Invisible Victims: Affirmative Action and the Mass Media

Prior posts from this book here and here.

From Frederick R. Lynch, Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action (Westport, CT: Praeger Paperback, 1991):

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND THE MASS MEDIA

The television in the average American home is now on more than seven hours each day. More than 60 percent of Americans indicate that television is their primary source of news. This suggests that both commercial programming and television journalism have enormous power to shape perceptions of reality. As Ralph Turner and Lewis Killian have pointed out, the mass media authenticate the facts and determine which issues are important (1987: 191-202).

In determining which issues are important and real, the media determine which topics will be debated and which points of view can be legitimately expressed. The media thus influence the formation and life of "publics," groups crucial to Western capitalist democracies. Publics are groups interested in, but divided about, an issue (Turner and Killian, 1987). According to Alvin Gouldner (1976), the free and rational debate of issues in publics has been a keystone of the dynamic character of capitalist societies. The bane of such freedom, of course, is censorship. Publics thrive only with free discussion and open debate.

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann has emphasized that the mass media provide people with the very words they use in debating an issue: "If the media fail to provide them, then there will be no words. . . . The media provide people with the words and phrases they can use to defend a point of view. If people find no current, frequently repeated expression for their point of view, they lapse into silence" (1984: 172-173).

David Altheide has suggested a strong connection between television news and perceptions of everyday reality. Citing data to support this contention, Altheide holds that there is a "relationship between what people see

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on the nightly news and what they regard as problems and issues -- people 'watch the news' because that is where newsworthy events are presented" (1976: 25-26; see also Gans, 1978).

Noelle-Neumann holds that the mass media structure individual perceptions at the unconscious level. The individual unconsciously incorporates the media information and perceptions into his or her own views: "The individual adopts the eyes of the media and acts accordingly" (1984: 169).

There is no question that the mass media pervasively affect both how people think and about what they think. Social life is increasingly structured around the mass media. Everyday conversation is full of references to what is seen or read. Forecaster Faith Popcorn has suggested that Americans are increasingly "cocooning" themselves in their homes via video equipment (Newsweek, June 15, 1987:46-47).

In this chapter, I shall be assuming a very close relationship between what transpires on television and the major news media and the contents of American consciousness. Specifically, I shall argue that throughout most of the 1970s and well into the 1980s, the mass media have ignored affirmative action as a major issue. By so doing, they have effectively banished the topic from individual consciousness and widespread face-to-face conversation in publics.

By the term "mass media," I shall be referring to the major television networks, the major news magazines (especially Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report), and, to a lesser extent, major newspapers of national stature such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. I shall also examine how affirmative action was portrayed -- as little as it was -- on commercial programming.

As is the case throughout this study, I am concerned with affirmative action primarily in the form of preferential treatment for race and minority groups. I am less concerned with gender preferences.

My efforts here represent a combination of the traditional "count-and-prove" sociological approach and a more interpretive, qualitative, historical perspective. The sociology of silence is a somewhat peculiar area: how does one measure what was not (but, at times, logically might have been) discussed? Who does or should determine what is or should be "news" (Gans, 1978; Lichter, et al. 1986)?

I will try to measure with some degree of quantification the frequency of reporting on affirmative action in the periodical literature included in The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. When dealing with the most popular news and entertainment medium -- television -- I shall make use of the Vanderbilt University Television News Index and Abstracts. However, as the abstracts director has admitted in personal correspondence, the data provide only a partial account of the television record during this period.

I shall become somewhat more qualitative and interpretive when I turn to commercial television's treatment of affirmative action. I shall also employ

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a more qualitative or historical method of focusing on significant events that may have served to center the viewing and reading public's attention on affirmative action: The U.S. Supreme Court decision on Bakke in 1978, the Weber decision made the following year, the so-called conservative revolution (marked by California's Proposition 13 and the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980), the Pulitzer Prize scandal involving Janet Cooke, the contentious confirmation hearings on Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, and the 1988 Presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson.

I shall then briefly compare media coverage of affirmative action to media treatment of a highly related issue: busing. The chapter will conclude with an overview of the implications of this data and other studies on media ideologies and perceptions. […]

Affirmative Action in the Print Media: What Was Mentioned

Data from The Reader's Guide covering the period from March 1967 through February 1980 are presented in Table 5. These data indicate that there was never a total silence in the print media regarding affirmative action. However, it is important to remember that the Guide covers periodicals, most with highly limited circulations. Most of the articles on affirmative action were in a wide range of print media, from various business, labor, and ethnic journals to such intellectual outlets as Commentary and The New Republic.

Behind the numbers is the finding that the three major news weeklies -- Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report -- printed only about one article each per year on affirmative action. Most of those yearly articles (usually short ones) covered the same event or story. For example, in the

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late 1960s, the news magazines' affirmative action news accounts dealt with attempts to integrate the labor unions by the "Philadelphia Plan." In the 1972-73 period, Newsweek and U.S. News carried stories on colleges' and universities' efforts to implement affirmative action; Time did not. The recession of 1975 produced a new focus of conflict: affirmative action demands versus seniority in layoffs. Many of the forty-two affirmative action-related pieces for that year concerned this conflict.

In March 1976, U.S. News became the first of the major news weeklies to run a cover story on affirmative action. The magazine thus anticipated the rush of other articles that would be written as the Bakke case advanced to a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1977-78. Indeed, for the March 1977-February 1978 volume of The Reader's Guide, there were twenty-eight articles listed under the new heading: "Bakke". In the post-Bakke era, other new race/ethnic/sex-related headings began to appear in the Guide.

In addition to the fact that, especially prior to Bakke, the major news magazines paid relatively scant attention to affirmative action, the reporting that was done was usually after-the-fact accounting of various administrative and judicial faits accomplis in the realm of affirmative action implementation and enforcement. That is, the magazine reports and commentaries usually concerned court challenges, judicial decisions, and administrative conflicts that took place after affirmative action policies had been formulated "backstage" by government and corporate authorities. The media have undoubtedly missed much of the action in affirmative action due to the way such schemes have been imposed, as the previous chapters indicate (Mansfield, 1984).

A study of "East Coast Bias" in the news media by the Los Angeles Times (November 17-18, 1988) suggests that most major news organizations have long followed the leadership of The New York Times in deciding which issues merit press attention. Thus, it is likely that the major

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news weeklies contained in the survey of The Reader's Guide were following the Times' lead on this topic. Barry Gross's count of editorials and letters on affirmative action in The New York Times through 1977 reflects patterns found in my survey of The Reader's Guide (Gross, 1978: 163). I do not think one would find a different pattern of coverage on affirmative action in the daily print media.

Affirmative Action as "The Other Shoe That Doesn't Drop"

Instances of intentional or unintentional avoidance of affirmative action in logically related contexts pose a nearly unsolvable methodological problem. That said, there were clearly some areas of news coverage in which affirmative action could have or should have been raised, but was not.

As items in the "Sampler" chapter indicate, the press did eventually begin to grapple with the seemingly inverse relationship between affirmative action and standards of quality via standardized tests, grades, and other meritocratic criteria. However, there were earlier rumblings on the quality of education in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but the issue of affirmative action in such problems was largely ignored.

For example, in April 1978, in a New Times article entitled "What's the Opposite of Education"? reporter Rob Fleder described the hiring of hundreds of incompetent or illiterate teachers in the New York City public schools. That affirmative action might have provided some of the rationale for bureaucratic shortcuts in the hiring process was not mentioned, even though most of the problem teachers were Spanish-speaking. (A year later, in a 60 Minutes segment, the iconoclastic Mike Wallace was less charitable about bringing up affirmative action and its bearing on this same scandal.)

In the 1980s, all three major news weeklies ran cover stories on the crisis in teacher competence. All three reports ignored or quickly dismissed affirmative action's role in this. In the Time cover story entitled "Help! Teacher Can't Teach"! (June 16, 1980: 54-63) the magazine's writers immediately dismissed the "usual suspects" of affirmative action and busing in explaining declining standards in the teaching profession. Throughout the article, the reporters dodged the issue of affirmative action, including the obvious implications of their account of a teacher-testing program in Florida's Pinellas County: "Though all had their B.A. in hand, about one-third of the applicants (25% of the whites, 79% of the blacks) flunked Pinellas' test the first time they took it in 1979" (p. 58, emphasis mine). Only in the next-to-last paragraph of the eight-page article did the writers hint at the issue of affirmative action when they mentioned the fear in some circles that competency testing for teachers might discriminate against minorities.

Avoidance of linking affirmative action with declining competency in teaching was also obvious in the March 14, 1983, cover story on the subject by U.S. News and World Report (Pp. 37-42). The cover featured a white

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female teacher wearing a dunce cap. No mention was made of the low minority scores on teacher competency tests throughout the country until the final column of the final page of the story, and then the information was confined to two sentences. A similar cover story on the teaching competency crisis in Newsweek (September 24, 1984: 64-70) made no mention of affirmative action, race, or ethnicity, whatsoever.

TELEVISION COVERAGE OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

The Evening Newscasts

A review of affirmative action-related items in the Vanderbilt Television News Index and Abstracts from the first year of its publication in 1972 through 1980 reveals a pattern remarkably similar to that in the print media.

From 1972 to 1976, few reports dealing with affirmative action appeared on the nightly half-hour news broadcasts of the three major television networks. During these years, the three major networks combined devoted approximately twelve to fifteen minutes broadcast time per year to affirmative action-related reports. As with the print media, most of these reports were basically reports of faits accomplis, decisions by courts, for the most part, but also of actions or reports of other government agencies such as the Justice Department or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

Television journalists, however, appear to have been slightly ahead of their colleagues in the print realm in recognizing the implications and importance of the U.S. Supreme Court's willingness to hear the Bakke case. Whereas Newsweek did not print its first cover story on affirmative action until 1977, NBC News devoted four and a half minutes of its nightly newscast on November 19, 1976, to a special segment on "reverse discrimination" and the Bakke case. CBS followed suit with a four-minute special on the same topic on December 14, 1976. The year 1977 saw an increasing number of reports on affirmative action, including a five-minute installment on ABC's nightly newscast on "discrimination, minority preference, school and housing desegregation" on August 24, 1977. Shortly afterward, CBS devoted nearly three and a half minutes to a clash over affirmative action politics at a steel mill.

When the Bakke case was argued before the Supreme Court on October 22, 1977, NBC devoted a full six minutes of its nightly newscast to the event, while CBS and ABC each gave the story about three minutes. There was very little reporting on affirmative action during the first half of 1978. By mid-June, however, the nightly newscasts were anticipating a decision on the Bakke case. When the decision arrived on June 28, 1978, it marked the high-water mark in television news coverage of affirmative action. ABC turned over most of its evening newscast to discussion of the decision. NBC

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stayed with the story for sixteen minutes; CBS, for fifteen minutes. In the following two days, NBC and CBS each took four to five minutes covering the aftermath of the decision.

During the remainder of 1978, ABC focused for more than three minutes on a Supreme Court decision sanctioning use of race in hiring and promotions. NBC later devoted four minutes to a story on the court-ordered imposition of a quota system for the Bridgeport, Connecticut, Fire Department. Each of the networks devoted at least ninety seconds to scenes of Bakke enrolling at the UC Davis Medical School. And each network devoted somewhat more than two minutes to the Supreme Court's decision in late 1978 to hear the case of the "blue-collar Bakke," Brian Weber.

But neither the Weber case, nor any other issue regarding affirmative action, ever again caught the interest of television journalists the way Bakke did. The decision in the Weber case, handed down on June 27, 1979, received nearly six minutes on NBC (the same as Bakke) but only about three minutes on both ABC and CBS. Television reporting on affirmative action fell off precipitously after that. Television was beginning to focus on another matter; just above the topic heading of "integration" in the Vanderbilt Television Abstracts, the number of entries under the topic of "Inflation" began to grow rapidly.

Other Television Coverage of Affirmative Action

There have been very few national news specials or public affairs programs of any consequence on the topic of affirmative action. The issue was twice debated on the PBS series The Advocates in the early 1970s, but the audience for these programs was minuscule. On the other hand, the normally intrepid reporters for the popular news show 60 Minutes dealt only once with affirmative action prior to Bakke. This was a rather timid segment entitled "Why Me"? concerning an affirmative action program in a security guard company. In the post-Bakke era, 60 Minutes has dealt more critically with affirmative action issues at least twice.

The first major (hour-long) network news special on affirmative action per se was broadcast by ABC on August 27, 1977. The Equality Debate opened with the Bakke case but moved on to explore other areas of affirmative action, such as quota programs in hiring and promotions among California correctional officers and in the Atlanta police and fire departments. The program was given a half-page "Close-Up" in T. V. Guide. Unfortunately, the program aired opposite a football game featuring the popular Dallas Cowboys, so few people tuned in.

In the mid- 1980s, affirmative action was debated on a PBS series, The Constitution, The Delicate Balance. On June 16, 1985, a Satellite Town Meeting anchored by Ted Koppol on the topic "Racism: New Times, New Questions" aired on many, though not all, ABC affiliates. A second special appeared one year later on June 20, 1986, a PBS-sponsored Frontline: "Assault on Affirmative Action". The ABC and Frontline programs were well-balanced, though both tended to focus heavily upon effects of affirmative action upon public

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sector workers, notably fire department personnel and school teachers. The ABC special included a specially commissioned public opinion poll, which found the usual results: though most of those polled still thought discrimination was a problem, 82 percent rejected quotas for hiring and promotion.

Until the mid- 1980s, affirmative action was not a popular topic on television talk shows and appears to have been actively avoided. Whether there were systematic efforts to suppress the affirmative action issue is difficult to determine. However, sporadic censorship of affirmative action was suggested by social critic and satirist Mort Sahl as he was discussing his own radio talk show on the NBC Tomorrow show. Asked by host Tom Snyder if he had ever received pressure from network executives concerning the contents of the radio show, Saul mentioned that he had received pressure on only one topic: affirmative action. Snyder did not pursue the point and the issue was never raised on Tomorrow until the Janet Cooke scandal (discussed below). The reconstitution of the civil rights commission and the appearance of welfare-state critiques, such as Charles Murray Losing Ground (1984b), led to raising the issue of affirmative action on some talk shows such as Donahue, in the mid-1980s. Omission rather than comment remained the rule.

For example, in 1983 NBC broadcast a one-hour special on America in Search of Itself, based upon Theodore White's book of the same name. White's book contained a long section in which he critiqued the ideology of race and sex quotas. That section of the book had been heavily attacked in major reviews. But there was no mention of affirmative action or even race and ethnicity in the NBC program. In fact, there was only one black face in the entire broadcast: a quick shot of a black woman beaming at Senator Kennedy as he made a speech. Also typical of this pattern was a 1983 edition of The David Susskind Show devoted to a discussion of the relations between blacks and Jews. Though the four main guests tried to bring up the divisive issue of race and sex quotas, Susskind kept the focus largely on foreign affairs. Eventually, five minutes of the ninety-minute program were permitted for a quick airing of the issue.

Affirmative Action on Commercial Television

I have already described in the previous chapter the 1975 All in the Family episode that dealt with affirmative action. There have been few other portrayals of affirmative action in other television programs. An episode of the series Paper Chase showed the struggle and ultimate success of a female law-school student who had been admitted under a quota. The only hint of problems with affirmative action came in an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati, when a black disc jockey discovered that he had been offered a posh job with a corporation mainly because he was black.

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Well into the mid- 1980s, then, commercial television writers and producers avoided the issue of affirmative action. On those few occasions when such policies were acknowledged, the message was either openly sympathetic or that affirmative action was a non-controversial reality that should simply be accepted.

To my knowledge, there has never been a major television program in which a white male's life was considerably damaged because of affirmative action barriers. Indeed, those familiar with television fare would probably find the mere possibility of such a script unthinkable. Affirmative action has received satiric treatment in a 1987 film, Soul Man. The movie portrays a young white male who gains an affirmative action scholarship to Harvard Law School by chemically darkening the color of his skin. Some critics denounced the film as "racist." […]

EVENTS AND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

In news and commercial programming, then, affirmative action has been ignored. Thus, the mass media have, to some extent, created a reality in which this issue and its attendant problems do not exist.

Yet the media do mediate. Events occur, whether the media are predisposed to cover them or not.

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[…] In 1981, however, journalists had to focus on an affirmative action-tinged scandal in their own profession. In that year, a young, black, female Washington Post reporter, Janet Cooke, had to return the Pulitzer Prize because it was discovered that she had fabricated the story for which she had been honored. The Pulitzer governing board had overridden the recommendation of its own committees in granting Cooke the award.

Several prominent journalists immediately raised the issue of preferential treatment by both the Pulitzer governing board and by the Post in initially hiring Cooke. Asked by a nervous Tom Snyder ("People may accuse me of being racist for asking this") if the Pulitzer board members had bypassed their own award committees in order to give the award to a black female, Pulitzer committeewoman Judith Crist responded, "Of course they were. That's exactly what they were doing." They were overly anxious to hire Cooke in the first place because she would have qualified as a "twofer" for affirmative action purposes: She was both black and female. Indeed, in a special essay on the scandal for U. S. News and World Report (May 4, 1981: 80-81), author James Michener charged that this could have been the only reason for the Post's failure to check out Cooke's fraudulent credentials. ABC reporter Ted Koppel pointedly criticized Post ombudsman Hugh Green for ignoring affirmative action implications in his (Greene's) sixteen thousand-word analysis of the scandal.

The Cooke case is an excellent example of an event from which the media really could not turn away, even though it was apparent that the reporters and commentators did not relish discussing the obvious affirmative action implications of the scandal.

By way of contrast, most of the news media, and the academic community as well, could and did ignore a 1982 National Academy of Sciences'

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Research Council report that strongly discounted "cultural bias" in standardized testing (Los Angeles Times, February 3, 1982). The report was clearly relevant to the debate on merit-based criteria versus affirmative action. It has rarely been cited since.

[…] The Jesse Jackson presidential campaign obviously raised many issues with regard to race in American society. Initially, both journalists and rival politicians were timid in their treatment of Jackson. Eventually, press and politicians grew somewhat less cautious. Nevertheless, journalists and political opponents refused to question Jackson about affirmative action. Typical of press coverage was a Newsweek (March 21, 1988: 18-23) cover story on Jackson that did not once mention affirmative action; nor was the topic raised when Jackson was the sole guest on a Donahue show (May 29, 1987). When Jackson mentioned affirmative action by name or used the broader term "social justice," he was rarely, if ever, challenged by journalists or other politicians to explain how such policies might affect middle-class whites.

Jackson's color undoubtedly linked his candidacy to racial policies (busing and affirmative action) in the minds of white voters -- whether they were "racist" or not. Furthermore, Jackson had led, or had threatened to lead, boycotts against major corporations, such as Coca-Cola, Burger King, and MacDonald's, unless they signed "fair share" agreements (i.e., quotas) to give blacks a "fair share" proportion of jobs or franchises (see The New Republic, May 9, 1988: 10-13). By 1988, Democratic party leaders already

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knew that whites were decoding the Democratic campaign theme for "justice" and "fairness" as having anti-white or reverse-discrimination overtones (see Greenberg, 1985; also, Newsweek, December 9, 1985: 38). There can be little doubt that sizable segments of whites viewed Jackson's use of these terms with the same mistrust.

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AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND THE MASS MEDIA: LIBERAL BIAS?

Members of the mass media, especially print and television journalists, are defensive about continuing accusations of liberal bias. Nevertheless, such accusations have been confirmed in an increasing amount of scholarship and data. The evidence has become so obvious that even press insider columnist David Broder (1987) admits that the press in general shares "reformist values" with regard to civil rights, civil liberties, political reform and social legislation (Broder, 1987: 334). He refuses to acknowledge this as an ideology and maintains that it does not affect reporting of the news.

A press outsider, sociologist Herbert Gans (1978), also delineated what he termed a "paraideology" amongst the press. Like Broder, Gans identified this paraideology as reformist; he argued that the news selected by the media has tended to affirm many key reformist values in the American polity. One of those values has been "altruistic democracy," a value that incorporates the sanctity of racial integration.

If what Broder and Gans both indicate is true, then reporters and editors would surely shy away from stories or potential stories that are dissonant with the values of altruistic democracy and racial integration. Injuries sustained by white males under affirmative action is precisely such a topic.

Lichter, Rothman, and Lichter have published a detailed study of a systematic sample of the 238 "men and women who put together the news at America's most important media outlets -- the media elite" (1986: 21). The Lichters and Rothman found that 54 percent identified themselves as liberal, while only 17 percent were conservative. The predominantly white, college-educated males heavily favored liberal sources over business or conservative sources in obtaining data on controversial issues. Compared to a

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sample of businessmen given the same social science perception tests, the journalists were far more liberal.

With specific regard to the affirmative action issue, Lichter et al. offered little new data. They briefly compared the responses of their samples of journalists and businessmen to a report on the Bakke case. They found that the majority of both groups summarized the article in a straightfoward or neutral manner. But "among those remembering only a pro-affirmative action side, journalists outnumbered businessmen by 62 to 38 percent" (1986: 65). Lichter et al. cited another survey of 3,000 reporters and editors, in which 81 percent of the journalists voiced approval of affirmative action for minorities versus 57 percent of the public.

The findings of Lichter et al. with regard to coverage of busing by Time, The New York Times, the CBS evening news, and The Washington Post during 1970-79 suggest a positive portrayal of affirmative action. The authors found "a slight but consistent tilt in favor of pro-busing arguments. At all four media outlets, the majority of arguments coded presented busing in a favorable light" (1986: 233). Furthermore, "the anti-busing arguments were somewhat more likely to be criticized when they did appear" (1986: 234).

The liberal paraideology (to use Gan's term) of the press does not necessarily bias treatment of a given story or issue. More insidiously, the ideology and its taboos can deflect coverage and analysis of an issue or event altogether. As shall see in the following chapter, when a spiral-of-silence situation is developing around an issue, neglect or censorship by the mass media can have enormous impact. Lack of a conservative counterforce in the media and considerable evidence of regional bias centered around New York (and The New York Times in particular) compound and reinforce such processes.

Preview of the New McCarthyism

Joseph Sobran (1987) takes a darker, more critical view of contemporary journalism's liberal/progressive underpinnings. Sobran argues that this ideology has become deeply embedded in the thought, language and everyday etiquette of journalists and intellectual elites. A tiny violation of this ideology/protocol can be devastating, getting one labeled as racist, among other things. The elements of Sobran's analysis are intriguing:

The progressives' own value judgements don't have to be stated. They're built into the form of the stories themselves. The forces of the Past come equipped with a discernible set of traits: bigotry, greed, hate, selfishness, ignorance, zealotry, extremism -- terms that by now all have a "right-wing" whiff about them. Ever hear of a liberal or a left-wing bigot or hate-group?

By the same token, the forces of the Future can be discerned by their compassion, idealism, hope, intelligence, openness to new ideas. . . .

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The mythology also generates an etiquette, a set of progressive proprieties, breach of which can mean embarrassment and even political ruin. . . . The media carefully observe the progressive etiquette, beginning with diction: "black," "gay," "spokesperson." One of liberalism's great coups has been to transmute ideology into etiquette: A code of behavior in minutiae is awkward to argue with. The wrong opinion, the wrong word, can be a headline-making "gaffe," a social blunder, disclosing lack of compassion, unraised consciousness, "insensitivity."

And "Racism." What's that?

It used to mean something definable: a belief in the superiority of one race. . . . The word now has no definition and would lose most of its utility if it did. It's a piece of liberal billingsgate, a name without a thing, though liberal social philosophers discuss it as if it were a real substance. . . . It's not up to anyone to decide whether he himself is a "racist." It's not a matter of squaring things with meanings anymore. We're in ideological wonderland now. If the relevant opinion cartel declares you "racist," you're racist. . . .

Think of all the energy expended nowadays avoiding being declared "racist" (or "sexist" or "homophobic"). The charges emanate from amorphous clouds of attitude and amount to cues to others of like attitude to look, note, smear, ostracize, boycott, denounce, deplore, or bomb, as time and means afford. An informal defamation league takes care of these matters. (1987: 33-34)

The implications of Sobran's analysis regarding the mass media's treatment of affirmative action are clear: speaking or writing incorrectly about the issue can get even the most well-meaning person labeled racist.

In his saga of busing in Boston, Common Ground, J. Anthony Lukas found that the press in Boston cooperated in a well-intentioned conspiracy, engaging in pro-busing, anti-Irish self-censorship to, in the words of an operations manager at the NBC outlet, "'use television to create an atmosphere of compliance with Judge Garrity's order. . . (1985: 501). Lukas quoted a key reporter for the Boston Globe as stating, "'If they [white Boston Irish] don't like integration, we'll shove it down their throats . . . (1985: 504).

Sobran's and Lukas's observations suggest more than the operation of a mere paraideology. Such descriptions suggest a more insidious form of censorship and thought control, which, in the next chapter, I shall describe as the New McCarthyism.

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