The National Newspaper Publishers Association, also known as the Black Press of America, is a federation of more than 200 black local and community newpapers. A recent article by one of its writers sings Kerry’s praises on civil rights and, in an interview, passes on his criticisms of President Bush’s civil rights record.
At one point the interviewer gave Kerry the chance to move away from his 1992 comments at Yale that were critical of affirmative action (which I discussed here and here), and move away he did.
In that speech, Kerry said: “This shift in the civil rights agenda has directed most of our attention and much of our hope into one inherently limited and divisive program: affirmative action. The truth is that affirmative action has kept America thinking in racial terms. ”
When read that quote, Kerry responded,
“What I was doing is pointing out the problem of where we found ourselves in the effort to apply it and in the effort to have an urban agenda, ” he said. “There was only a paragraph or so that referred to affirmative action. And I clearly said in the beginning and at the end of it, I support affirmative action.”
….
Given another chance to state his views on affirmative action, Kerry states: “I support it now and I will always support it in the future in order to achieve what we need to achieve in terms of diversity in this country. And it’s a strength, not a weakness. It’s not just universities that have come to realize that. It’s the whole country. ” [Emphasis added]
But Kerry’s sworn fealty to affirmative action forever is not as surprising as what comes next. According to the article (a news article, not an editorial), “Most public opinion polls show that Americans do support the concept of affirmative action.” [Emphasis added]
This statement is true in such a limited sense that it’s actually blatantly false. It’s true in that public opinion surveys over the years have shown that most people will indeed say they support “affirmative action” if their choice is a yes or no response to that that term. They have also shown support for “the concept of affirmative action” where that concept was the original one: employers and others taking affirmative steps to make sure that no one is discriminated against on the basis of race. But whenever “affirmative action” is described as it now actually operates in practice, i.e., using racial preference or otherwise judging whites and blacks by different standards, it has uniformly been rejected, and usually by wide margins.
Most press bias involves matters of interpretation or distortion. This example comes close to an outright falsehood.
[Cross-Posted on Oh, That Liberal Media!]
