Kaus And Effect

Several readers have emailed asking my opinion of Mickey Kaus’s May 5 hypothetical on race, regulation, and journalistic ethics. For those of you who haven’t seen it (Why haven’t you? It’s been there since Monday!), Kaus compares the recent episode of the New York Times firing a young minority reporter, Jayson Blair, to a hypothetical situation where trucks from Utah are subjected to relaxed safety standards in order to promote commerce in that state and one of them crashes because of bad brakes.

The NYT apparently has run a minority internship program that has the effect–since the internships routinely lead to job offers–of hiring minority reporters right out of college, without the customary years of seasoning at smaller papers. Blair seems to have been hired by the Times (after an internship) before he even graduated from college.

Kaus acknowledges the possible benefits of racial preferences in newsroom hiring, but he insists

that people should also acknowledge that there are costs, and that one of those costs is almost certainly a) more cases of African-American reporters who screw up, and b) uncertainty about whether a program of no special-preferences might have averted any particular screw-up before it turned into a credibility- and career-damaging incident. … There’s also the distinct possibility that the costs outweigh the benefits even for the intended direct beneficiaries such as Blair. In the long run, the NYT doesn’t seem to have done him any favors–not to mention the effect on other African-American reporters who now have to unfairly labor under the sneaking suspicion that they are potential Blairs.

I would like to reiterate a point I have made several times before (here, here, and here, for example) by observing that racial preferences have even more in common with economic regulation than is suggested by Kaus’s ingenious analogy.

Racial preferences, in essence, are a form of government regulation. They attempt to regulate the racial and ethnic “market” in many of the same ways that economic regulation regulates the economic market. Similarly, critics of the two often make the same points: that regulation involves too much government intrusiveness; that it often involves an unfair redistribution of wealth or opportunity; that government should be an umpire enforcing clear rules equally rather than a playing coach, intervening to help some players at the expense of others. In other words, it is not accident (as we conspiracy theorists say) that Democrats/liberals have an affinity for both forms of regulation and that Republicans/conservatives generally resist both.

Almost as an aside, however, it may be worth pointing to one area where the two sides switch positions: immigration. Liberals, who generally favor strong government regulation of anything that moves (or doesn’t), often become true believers in the free market at the border, especially opposing any attempt to take race or ethnicity into account in deciding who may enter the country. Conservatives, on the other hand, usually oppose government regulation, but they want very tight governmental control over the borders, especially the border with Mexico. (Liberals, of course, will no doubt point out that there is nothing inconsistent here at all: border control agents are armed and wear uniforms, and since conservatives are all fascists anyway….)

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  1. Andrew Lazarus May 9, 2003 at 7:38 pm | | Reply

    Jayson Blair is just Janet Cooke’s younger brother.

    I suppose this is still overcompensation for journalism’s Jim Crow days, when the LA Times found at the time of the 1963 Watts riots that they didn’t have a single black reporter (who could safely go where whites would have been in physical danger). They sent one of their delivery truck drivers, whom they later promoted. (I remember this from his obit. It wasn’t a successful career, in large measure because of alcoholism.)

    I suppose this means there are, in fact, reasons for a paper to make sure it has racial integration, but that hardly explains how Cooke and Blair got away with so much.

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