Abysmal Coverage Of Race In The New York Times

I’ve been writing about how the mainstream media covers race issues for so long, and so much of that coverage is so bad, that I thought I was long past being shocked by the thoughtless (or worse, premeditated) dumbness that so often appears in publications widely if mistakenly thought to be reliable.

But I was wrong. This article, by Randal C. Archibold in yesterday’s New York Times on race-based strife at the University of California, San Diego, proves that I can still be shocked by mindless comment in the mainstream press, at least when it contains “analysis” like this:

… more than a decade after a state ballot proposition barred the use of race and ethnicity in admissions decisions, the University of California continues to struggle to diversify its campuses. Black and Latino undergraduate enrollment systemwide plummeted and, although gains have been made in the numbers of minority students since then, the proportion of white (30.5 percent) and Asian (39.8 percent) students enrolled last year far exceeded that of blacks (3.8 percent) and Latinos (20.4 percent).

Just a few years ago, the Los Angeles campus, one of the system’s most prestigious, was shaken with the news that only 103 black freshmen had enrolled, 2.2 percent of the class in a county that is 9.4 percent black. (The numbers have since ticked up to about 4.5 percent of the class.)

Where to begin … where to begin? How about with the assumption — actually, here it’s more overt argument than implicit assumption — that selective universities are at fault, whether they’re overtly discriminating or not, if their student bodies are not a demographic mirror of … of … what? UCLA presumably should mirror its “county,” but UCSD, described as “set on a bluff along the Pacific Ocean,” is in a county that in 2008 was only 5.5% black. Should that be the target? Moreover, if the standard is demographic mirroring of, well, of something — city, county, state, whatever — why does the article demonstrate no concern, why does it apparently not even notice, that the proportion of whites in the University of California system (30.5%) is dramatically far below the proportion of whites in the state of California (42.3% in 2008)?

I suppose it could be argued that even authors of articles that purport to be news in the New York Times are entitled to reveal their own peculiar assumptions (selective universities should be demographic mirrors of some jurisdiction), but they are not entitled to their own facts, and it is simply not true that after the passage of Prop. 209, prohibiting racial preferences, “Black and Latino undergraduate enrollment systemwide plummeted,” a drastic decline that even now has been characterized only by “gains” that are implied to be small, still leaving them woefully underrepresented.

Here are some facts that go unmentioned in the NYT article:

• The sharpest decline of any group in the year after passage of Prop. 209 was experienced by whites, who fell from 40% of system admits to 34%, where they remained through 2005.
• By 2002 the proportion of underrepresented minorities admitted to the university system, 19.1%, exceeded the proportion admitted in 1997, 18.8%, the last year in which preferences were in effect.
• The proportion of admitted URMs rose to 19.8% in 2003 and to 20% in 2004.
• A revealing graph of freshman enrollment by ethnicity, 1997–2005, can be found here, which also provides the numbers for the unmentioned (as though it does not exist) California State University system.
• The more recent numbers are even more dramatic. The proportion underrepresented minority admits was 22.9% in 2007, 25.1% in 2008, and 26.9% in 2009.

Ending preferential treatment of minorities did decrease their proportion at Berkeley and UCLA, the most selective campuses in the university system, but that is not the same as the Times’s assertion that minority enrollment plummeted “systemwide.” Ending preferential treatment did not end minority representation; it redistributed it to other campuses in the university system and to the state college system.

Perhaps the (former?) “newspaper of record” can no longer expect its writers to perform research, but you’d think that there would be fact checkers or, heaven forbid, editors to catch errors like declaring that minority “undergraduate enrollment systemwide plummeted” when it did not.

ADDENDUM

As if to prove my point about the New York Times often stumbling, or worse, in its coverage of race issues, another article that appeared yesterday, “To Court Blacks, Foes of Abortion Make Racial Case,” commits a doozy that makes my case better than my mere assertion.

Read this paragraph, then re-read it:

In 2008, Lila Rose, a college student at U.C.L.A. and the founder of an anti-abortion group called Live Action, released four audio recordings of a man trying to make donations to Planned Parenthood clinics to pay for black women’s abortions. In one, the caller, played by James O’Keefe III, the provocateur recently arrested on charges that he tried to tamper with the telephones of Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, said, “You know, we just think, the less black kids out there, the better,” to which the Planned Parenthood employee replies, “Understandable, understandable.”

First, the “fact” that’s here but wrong: what O’Keefe was arrested for was “entering federal property under false pretenses,” but even that charge is now up in the air. As the New Orleans Times Picayune reported several days ago,

The U.S. attorney’s office in New Orleans has another month to decide what, if any, charges to bring against the four men arrested at the end of January in Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office, including conservative activist James O’Keefe.

Louis Moore, the magistrate judge for the federal district court in New Orleans, agreed Wednesday to motions on behalf of the four to extend the time by which the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District must seek a felony indictment, press misdemeanor charges or drop the case.

Moore said the extension, which was unopposed by prosecutors, would offer the parties “additional time to conduct informal discussions and discovery and avoid or lessen additional proceedings,” suggesting the possibility of a plea deal that would likely spare the four from facing felony charges.

But mere factual error and incompleteness is not the most egregious journalistic offense here. Can you imagine discussing James O’Keefe, describing him (accurately enough, I think) as a recently arrested “provacateur,” and not even mentioning his role in single-handedly destroying ACORN?

But why imagine it when you can read it (or in this case, not read it) in the New York Times?