Presswatch/Preferring the Law

...On December 18 Michael Williams held his second press conference within a week, this time to announce what the media had widely predicted would be a policy reversal...

...Williams was taking aim not at race-based scholarships but at race-exclusive ones—those that make race the determining factor...

...Engberg quoted no one, other than Williams, in defense of the policy...

...One reason for the hysteria in the White House was the hysteria in the newspapers and on television, which Lesley Stahl of CBS typified: "Someone [who...

...Engberg did not distinguish between a violation of law and a sanction, as would have been appropriate, nor did he indicate the extreme unlikelihood of the latter...

...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991...

...This is surprising, as Title VI is so clear that not even the White House politicians could rewrite it, although they did prevail upon Education to relax its enforcement apparatus for four years, to give colleges and universities time to review their scholarship programs...

...O n December 13, the print media continued to feature reactions from university types like Hesburgh...

...The post-mortems on the minority scholarship story made these points, though they failed to note the media's own role in fueling the hysteria that led to the policy revision...

...So Williams wrote bowl officials, commending them for their efforts "at advancing minority opportunities" but advising them of the universities' "civil rights obligations...

...Lets Stand Curb on College Aid Keyed to Race...

...Nor did they observe the most important point: President Bush had missed an opportunity to encourage the nation to move away from programs of naked racial preference, and to invite it to "think anew," to borrow the President's favorite Lincoln quote, about matters of race and equal opportunity...

...The Post redeemed itself somewhat on December 17 with a piece that gave equal time to both sides...

...The Post reporters apparently did not ask why the White House had not undertaken a "review" when Williams first notified the Fiesta Bowl on December 4. But the answer was implicit in the story...

...This was inaccurate, if for no other reason than Williams now was going to allow the Fiesta Bowl to give Alabama and Louisville race-exclusive scholarships after all...

...Later that night, CBS's Charles Kuralt managed to outdo his colleague Engberg...

...While profiles of Williams noted his previous tenure in the Civil Rights Division of the Reagan Justice Department, none of them understood its relevance...

...There was serious hysteria here," Kenneth J. Cooper and Ann Devroy quoted "one official" as saying...

...That Michael Williams himself held a previously scheduled press conference on the same day to articulate his law enforcement goals would make the story bigger still...

...it does not come from private parties such as the Fiesta Bowl...

...Tony Mauro of USA Today, on the otherhand, deserves credit for fmding at least one calm observer...

...O n the evening of December 12, CBS misreported and distorted the story...

...On "America Tonight," Kuralt "reported": "Scholarships set aside for racial or ethnic minorities, [Education] said, discriminate against the white majority and are, therefore, illegal...

...So it fashioned a plan to award $100,000 to each of the two participating universities (Alabama and Louisville) for scholarships for blacks only...

...at Education they often wait for complaints to roll in...

...Such cutoffs have never been implemented, because universities and colleges have typically found ways to comply with government regulations...

...Time remarked that it "was hard to find anyone . . . in the education world who did not express dismay...

...The story featured reactions from college administrators and scholarship fund directors who were, to put it mildly, not pleased...

...Stahl herself?] said to me today: 'This is Willie Horton Goes to College...

...A Bush appointee at the federal Department of Education, Michael Williams, a lawyer charged with enforcing civil rights law, saw a problem...

...On December 14, the Washington Post and other news organizations reported that the Education policy was now "under review...

...But Williams had not announced that...

...I can sympathize with the journalists who were trying to cover the administration's revised policy...

...Most of the funding for those grants is found precisely there...

...Nor did Williams say that Education would cut off federal funds to schools found in violation of the law, something the New York Times had included in its lead paragraph and which Engberg and others repeated...

...Williams took his Justice approach to Education, responding to a situation he had learned about in media accounts...

...What Kuralt did here was falsely (and maliciously...

...Reporter Karen DeWitt noted the anti-racial preference views of author Shelby Steele, economist Walter Williams, and housing expert Robert Woodson...

...The media and political firestorm did not come until December 12, when the New York Times ran a lengthy front-page piece reporting Williams's Fiesta Bowl action as part of a seemingly new Education policy against Terry Eastland is resident fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.0 most race-exclusive scholarships...

...It was implied that conservative government is okay, as long as it does nothing...

...Some of the stories of the "policy reversal" muddled this rather large point and the law behind it...

...On December 15, the Washington Post described how the Education Department (as the headline went) "Had Rejected Analysis Now Used in Ban on Race-Based Scholarships...

...But this was not the case, as most in the media eventually figured out...

...What everyone took to be a new policy was not really new—it had just not been taken seriously...

...Williams acted purely (and naively, as he later said) as a law enforcement official...

...PRESSWATCH PREFERRING THE LAW by Terry Eastland L ast fall, the committee of the Fies- to Bowl, held in Arizona, decided it had to atone for the state's refusal to approve a Martin Luther King, Jr...

...It was the strange product of a White House confused on matters of principle and law, lacking a civil rights strategy, and vulnerable to charges of "insensitivity" toward blacks...

...Engberg quoted Theodore Hesburghas pledging his own "dead body" to stop the policy, Benjamin Hooks as saying he had never seen a policy "more stupid, more outrageous, more irrational and more prejudiced," and a student on a minority scholarship as saying he'd be "in a bind" without it...

...But for Education the problem with race-based scholarships was their inconsistency with a law intended to make race neither an advantage nor a disadvantage in the allocation of society's goods and opportunities...

...It is notable, too, that the Education policy won the support of liberal columnists Richard Cohen and Clarence Page...

...Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, universities receiving federal funds, as both were in this instance, may not lawfully award scholarships solely on the basis of race...

...While most accounts stuck to the story line of a reversal or retreat, the New York Times reported that the "U.S...

...One reason for the hoopla was the media's insistence on portraying the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 27 policy as part of an aggressive new Republican strategy to oppose quotas...

...Because opponents of Williams's policy were typically arguing from what the department had done before—i.e., from precedent, as opposed to federal statutes, the Constitution, and the Supreme Court's rulings —this story told it their way...

...Eric Engberg said that Education would "cut off federal funds to schools that use race as a criterion in awarding scholarships...

...I don't know what all the hoopla is about," he quoted a Georgetown law professor (Charles Abernathy) as saying...

...n the other hand, part of "the curb on college aid keyed to race" did stand: universities receiving federal assistance may not lawfully use money from their own general operating budgets for race-exclusive scholarships...

...Newsweek carried a similar piece in its December 24 issue, quoting Steele: "The whole ruckus over preferences is a distraction from all the expense and effort it would take to bring black students up to par in elementary and secondary schools...

...What they did has been the law . . . now, they are going to enforce [it...

...Botched and biased stories like Engberg's were common as the media raced to match the Times's front-pager...

...On December 13, the White House let it be known that (1) President Bush had problems with the Education policy and (2) neither he nor anyone else close to him had known what Williams was doing...

...Yet for taking it seriously Williams was reviled by the New York Times as "a zealot gone mad...

...Williams released his letter to the media the day he sent it, and his action made the wires, with short and simple stories...

...At Justice, civil rights lawyers often learn about possible violations of law from media accounts...

...attribute to Williams a view of discrimination that turns on which race is being discriminated against...

...One of the better accounts was the New York Times's enterprising article (December 17) on how the policy had "highlighted a rift between establishedcivil rights groups and a small but growing number of blacks who question whether members of racial minorities should get preferential treatment...

...holiday...

...Moreover, he dared to acquaint the world of higher education with a law his predecessors had generally ignored...

...Williams suggested other ways Fiesta officials might design a scholarship program that would not complicate the legal lives of Alabama and Louisville but still accomplish the bowl's purposes...

...All the major media—print and picture alike—would now do the story big...

...There were a fair number of Time-like advocacy pieces calling for a retreat from Williams's policy...