"ABC wins top grade for diversity"--that's the condescending headline atop Nellie Andreeva's story in The Hollywood Reporter, eagerly distributed by Reuters. Here's an excerpt from this all-too-typical "news" story, which singled out ABC's "Ugly Betty" for special praise and attention:
The success of "Betty" earned ABC an A-minus for the 2006-07 season, the highest grade for any network rated by the Multi-Ethnic Media Coalition.
The group's seventh annual diversity report card grades the broadcast networks for hiring minority talent in front and behind the camera and in the executive ranks, as well as "overall commitment to diversity initiatives."
No doubt lots of people in New York and LA and DC care a lot about these sort of ratings, carried out, as they are, by liberal/ethnic pressure groups.
But as Cal Thomas and others have argued for decades, the real issue of diversity isn't gender or skin color, it's diversity of thought and character. And that latter sort of diversity, of course, is not at all important to these ratigs outfits, nor to THR, nor to Reuters.
Thomas, who is a regular on "Fox News Watch," says that sex and race are much less important than what people think, and how they behave--"the content of their character," as Martin Luther King Jr. declared.
But the MSM, steered along by these pressure groups--which seem to spring into existence only when it's time for a press release or a lawsuit--choose to define "diversity" as everything but ideology and partisanship.
That is, the MSM & Co. just assume that every good person is a liberal, and so there's no need to worry about diversity on that score, because the distinction is not beween different kinds of "diverse" peoples, but rather, between good and evil.
And nobody wants "evil," right?
Well, the whole point of true diversity is that we get debate on these issues, starting with, as Socrates asked, "What is The Good?"
If we can't get honest and sincere debate about that question, and all the questions that flow therefrom, then it hardly matters whether they faces we see on TV are different colors or not. The real problem is that they all think the same.
And the even greater problem for the MSM, of course, is that people are on to them now. People know that arranging for liberals to get patted on the head is no subsitute for true debate, true argument--and true diversity.
That's why eyeballs are migrating elsewhere, to the New Media, and the Newer Media, even as ABC and their ilk continue to pile up awards and Reuters continues to act like these awards are a big deal.
People who want true diversity in the media have to look in lots of places--more and more, away from the MSM.
