“With little fanfare and not much credit, President Bush has appointed a more diverse set of top advisers than any president in history.” That was the lead sentence in a USA Today story about how USA Today, a very liberal politically correct paper, was going to give the President credit for having a diverse cabinet. But later, reporter Susan Page let the President have it. She reported that “critics” say “there’s a shortage of diversity on at least one measure: diversity of opinion.”
That’s what we’ve been saying about the liberal media for years. But Susan Page and USA Today are not concerned about that. Indeed, this article about alleged diversity in the Bush administration says a lot more about the lack of true diversity in the media. They’re concerned with the fact that President Bush is appointing minorities who are conservatives. Senator Harry Reid, for one, doesn’t know how to deal with that. Asked about possible Bush appointments to the Supreme Court, he recently told Tim Russert on Meet the Press that he thought black conservative Clarence Thomas was a lousy Supreme Court Justice. He offered no evidence for that claim and wasn’t challenged to provide any. On the other hand, he had no substantial objection to Justice Antonin Scalia, a white conservative.
On that topic of diversity in opinion, Page noted that “most of Bush’s [minority] appointees haven’t been particularly active in traditional advocacy groups,” as if that were an indictment. The phrase, “traditional advocacy groups,” is a convoluted way to describe “liberal groups” such as the NAACP. So conservatives weren’t active in liberal groups? Is that significant?
The Susan Page story demonstrated that the liberal push for “diversity” is really a fraud. Isn’t it funny how “diversity” for the Bush Administration suddenly becomes diversity in opinion, too? What she’s saying is that conservatives in power ought to appoint liberals to run the government. We’re sure that would please the liberals who lost the election, including the liberals in the press.
Once ridiculed as “McPaper,” because of its short articles, USA Today’s Susan Page article was very long. And it was accompanied by a big graph of Bush’s cabinet compared to the cabinets of Presidents Clinton, Reagan and the first Bush. At the top were the designations, “White man, white woman, black woman, Hispanic man, Asian man, Asian woman.” The results were there in black and white. According to Page, the fascinating numbers included the fact that “White Anglo men made up 71% of the first President Bush’s Cabinet.”
For the record, Page is a white Anglo woman. Why didn’t she report that? This could be the direction that journalism could be headed as well. After every by-line, USA Today could include the label, “white man” or “white woman” or whatever. If it’s relevant for government officials, why not for the press? The answer is that the whole topic is just plain silly. Since being black or white doesn’t tell you anything about the beliefs or policies of a person, why focus on it? It’s phony. What a waste of newsprint.
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