The Liberal Lady
Debate at the New York Times is a one-way street.

Mr. Kurtz is also a fellow at the Hudson Institute
June 18, 2001 8:15 a.m.

ultural bias in the academy and mainstream media is one of my favorite topics. But no matter how many times I write about it, I feel as though I never get it quite right. There’s always an impulse to find that smoking gun — that instance of bias so egregious that it sweeps aside the usual attempts at denial and obfuscation by the leftist powers that be. Such smoking guns exist. Yet the operation of leftist bias in our governing cultural institutions is typically a more subtle affair. You find it in debates that really aren’t debates — passionate disputes about, say, whether the most constructive resources for feminist thought are to be found in Marxism or in postmodernism. For a socially moderate or conservative American, it’s the Alice-in-wonderland quality of listening to these pseudo-debates on the left — in even mainstream cultural organs — that brings home the message that seemingly more conventional cultural ideas are now considered beyond the pale.

I had that Alice-in-wonderland experience last Saturday while reading an article in the New York Times about Kenji Yoshino, an activist gay law professor at Yale. The article, by Kristin Eliasberg, was headlined, “Making a Case For the Right to Be Different.” Professor Yoshino, it turns out, was one of the inspirations for Justice John Paul Stevens’s dissent in last year’s Supreme Court decision affirming the right of the Boy Scouts to exclude homosexuals from positions of leadership in their organization.

Professor Yoshino, whose work is influenced by queer theory and postmodernism, is looking to expand the meaning of constitutionally forbidden discrimination. Instead of prohibiting discrimination against “immutable traits,” like skin color, Yoshino want to read the Constitution as prohibiting discrimination based on anything that could be interpreted as a sign of a person’s social identity--their language, their hair-style, their personality, or their sexual orientation. In effect, Yoshino wants to use the Constitution to force people to “recognize and respect” attitudes and forms of behavior of which they disapprove.

Of course, while purporting to be based on a liberal respect for rights, Yoshino’s views fly in the face of our most cherished traditions of freedom. The right of free association, and the distinction between tolerance of those with different views and state-enforced approval of those with such views would all be cast aside if Yoshino’s ideas take hold. That certainly doesn’t mean Yoshino’s work isn’t worth writing about. It does mean that the least one might expect from our newspaper of record is some actual consultation with Yoshino’s critics.

Instead what the Times gives us is a series of quotes from friends, colleagues, and supporters of Yoshino. Those comments create the appearance of a debate, without actually allowing one to take place. Instead of finding a conservative legal scholar who might clearly and energetically explain the dangerous and controversial implications of Yoshino’s views, we get sympathizers who sorrowfully point out that the “lack of constitutional grounding” for Yoshino’s theories might be a bit of a “hurdle” for the poor professor. “I have a lot of respect for Yoshino’s work, but I think he tends to overestimate what judges will accept.” That’s the worst that is said of Yoshino. Maybe to the editors at the Times, that sounds like a debate. But to anyone who isn’t already on the cultural left, this article sounds like a bunch of radicals sitting around a table arguing about how to bamboozle a few judges into “subverting” the Constitution. And in fact the only time a conservative shows up in this article is in an anecdote supposedly illustrating how benighted judges who aren’t already sympathizers of queer theorists can be.

This inconspicuous article in the Times may convey as much about the day-to-day operation of bias in our newspapers and universities as the brouhaha over the ads by David Horowitz and the Independent Women’s Forum. A bunch of leftists ragging on conservatives and commiserating about how difficult it’s going to be to twist the Constitution into a shape that will accomplish their cultural ends--that is what goes on in much of the academy today. In that sense at least, the Times has covered the story with perfect accuracy."

Is there a solution? Sure. The Times could solve the problem easily enough, simply by bringing on some conservative reporters. Any reporter for a national paper of record like the Times ought to strive for balanced coverage. But reporters of different political and cultural dispositions will inevitably frame their stories, and interpret the imperative to be balanced, in different ways. That means that in addition to an ethic of fair representation of viewpoints within a story, we need to have a variety of reporters coming at stories from different perspectives. For a national daily newspaper, we need, not the pseudo-diversity of multiple leftist ethnicities, but a collection of reporters that reflects the range of political at cultural attitudes at play in our national debates.

Don’t hold your breath. Genuine diversity in the newsroom is something we will never get from the current management of the New York Times. In earlier columns I’ve looked at bias in the Times’s treatment of feminism and race. On issues of homosexuality, the outcome is no different. When it comes to the controversial cultural issues of our day, debate at the New York Times is a one-way street.