Still playing catch-up (see first post today), here’s another one:
Unpublished (indeed, unsent) Letter to the Washington Post about its Bias – Especially compared to the new Raines reign at the NYT, the WP is generally free of appearing to advance a left-liberal agenda in its news stories. (For a nice comparison that reflects well on the WP, see kausfiles for 6 June.) Still, far too many of the Post’s stories dealing with discrimination are marred by presumably unconscious assumptions that undermine and distort its reporting.
A nice case in point is “Sex Bias Cited in Vocational Ed,” which ran on June 6. (Section A, Page 8; it is now buried in the Post’s Archives.) First, no bias was cited. What was cited is “sex segregation,” reflected in the preponderance of girls in such classes as cosmetology and of boys in plumbing, automotive, etc. Your reporter, along with the National Women’s Law Center whose analysis he/she regurgitates, simply assumes that where there is sex segregation there must be bias. Just look at the lede: “Pervasive sex segregation persists in high school vocational programs around the country . . . 30 years after Congress passed a law barring such discrimination in education, according to a study released today.”
“SUCH DISCRIMINATION”??? Exactly what discrimination is that? Congress outlawed cosmetology classes with a preponderance of girls? Now it’s clear that the National Women’s Law Center believes that “underrepresentation” can only be explained by discrimination, but should the Post reflect this, well, bias in a news story?
This same bias has come out lately in various stories about Title IX and college sports, with womens’ groups finding discrimination wherever women are not proportionally represented on athletic teams despite evidence that proportionally more men are engaged in sports. True to form, the Post reflects this same bias in the last sentence of its “Sex Bias” story:
After noting that the number of high school girls playing competive sports has increased dramatically since Title IX’s passage, your writer concludes, “Still, women in Division I colleges represent more than half of the student body [sic], yet they receive only 41 percent of athletic scholarship dollars, 30 percent of recruiting dollars and 33 percent of overall athletic budgets, according to the law center.” [Emphasis added] In other words, the absence of perfect parity proves the presence of continuing discrimination.
The National Women’s Law Center and your “reporter” seem to think this says it all. And indeed it does: what you mean by “discrimination” is any statistical disparity.
