Abysmal Coverage Of Race In The New York Times (Cont’d)

Over a year and a half ago I discussed the Abysmal Coverage Of Race In The New York Times, with particular reference to a shockingly bad article by reporter Randal C. Archibold. An article today by Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak, I’m sad but not surprised to say, reveals that its race-related reporting has not improved.

I don’t begrudge Liptak his woeful lament that diversity — “the last man standing, the sole remaining legal justification for racial preferences in deciding who can study at public universities” — may be on its last legs, likely to be done in if the Supremes agree to grant cert to Fisher v. Texas (discussed here). I am no longer even surprised that liberals like Liptak and his employer now routinely note, with no pause for irony or reflection, that it is “the court’s more conservative justices” who are “hostile to the use of racial classifications by the government.” A whole generation of Times readers is now ignorant (and growing more so) of the fact that for most of its history in America liberalism led the fight for official colorblindness.

What I do mightily begrudge, however, are unsupported and in fact false factual assertions such as the following:

Grutter allowed but did not require states to take account of race in admissions. Several states, including California, have declined the invitation. As a result, there are fewer blacks and Hispanics on campus in the state.

I say “unsupported” because Liptak supports this opinion only with the unsupported opinion of one source:

“I would say that we have lost systemwide — undergraduate, graduate and professional — about one third of the black students we would have enrolled if affirmative action hadn’t ended,” said Vikram Amar, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. The proportion of blacks has dropped, he said, to about 3 to 4 percent from the 5 to 7 percent it would have been.

Prof. Amar is a justifiably respected scholar, and perhaps he is aware of more recent evidence than I’ve seen, but without that evidence neither his opinion nor Liptak’s assertion based on it is persuasive. But even if it is, it should be noted, when Amar says “systemwide” he is no doubt referring to the University of California system while Liptak’s assertion covers all the campuses in the state — the university system, the separate California State University system, community colleges, etc.

Thus it seems appropriate for me to repeat what I said in my previous criticism of the Times’s abysmal race coverage:

• 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.

And I will also conclude now what I concluded then:

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

Rather than add an addendum here, I have done so in a new post, here.