Shocking Racist Ideas Are Getting Treated as Science in Leading National Publications
FAIR / By Steve Rendall
Shocking Racist Ideas Are Getting Treated as Science in Leading National Publications
The corporate media needs to be much more vigilant when it comes to racism.
September 22, 2014 |
Nicholas Wade was a leading New York Times science writer for three decades, at one point the editor of the “Science Times” section. He retired from full-time work at the paper in 2012, and in May 2014 published A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, a book that has been described as a full-throated defense of “scientific racism” (New Statesman, 5/20/14). Wade’s embrace of the pseudoscience of eugenics raises questions about his tenure at theTimes, and about corporate media vigilance when it comes to racism.
Media frequently fail to challenge racism in high places (FAIR Blog, 6/27/14) - in part because some highly placed corporate media figures are themselves attracted to racialist ideologies. Extra! ( 4/05) documented this after New York Times columnists David Brooks ( 12/7/04) and John Tierney ( 10/24/04) approvingly cited the work of Steve Sailer, a central figure in the promotion of racist and anti-immigrant theories.
For his part, Brooks praised a Sailer article in the American Conservative (12/20/04) that celebrated white people who flouted the Western trend toward declining birth rates, having lots of children and leaving behind what Brooks called the “disorder, vulgarity and danger” of cities to move to “clean, orderly” suburban and exurban settings where they can “protect their children from bad influences.” Sailer himself made clear what those bad influences were, mentioning “ghetto hellions,” “illegal immigrants and other poor minorities.”
In 1994, when Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray published The Bell Curve, a book espousing the so-called “academic racist” theories that black people are inherently less intelligent and more prone to crime than whites or Asians, the New York Times Book Review ( 10/16/94) published a fawning, credulous review by Times science reporter Malcolm Browne.
More:
http://www.alternet.org/media/shocking-racist-ideas-are-getting-treated-science-leading-national-publications
