Presswatch / The Set-Aside Set
Eastland, Terry
M y text this month comes from a story by Thomas W. Lippman that ran in the Washington Post on December 1. The headline, "Energizing Minorities' Objectives," and subhead, "Legislation Offers...
...He withheld pertinent facts, such as that the set-aside does not require proof that its beneficiaries have suffered from past discrimination or that, if they have, it has undermined their ability to compete successfully for federal energy contracts...
...On January 3, Thomas Edsall, another Post writer, praised Clinton for trying to change the terms of debate...
...It also merits objection as pure pork, pork dispensed to people on the most objectionable grounds: skin color, ethnicity, and gender...
...And when the press does cover these issues, it often finds it hard to be timely...
...As the textbooks tell us, Congress makes the law, the executive enforces it...
...Clinton managed to make his diversity mania even more of a story when, on December 21, he accused certain women's groups of being "bean counters" playing "quota games and math games" with his cabinet and subcabinet choices...
...A few days later, the Post's editorial page defended Bill Clinton against Evan Kemp, the outgoing chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission...
...Presumably, the model for diversity at the Post is the Clinton cabinet...
...The 10-percent set-aside thus is not a "remedial" provision...
...He also failed to mention that Congress, in passing the Energy Policy Act, didn't find that the legally preferred groups had endured past discrimination in federal procurement contracts...
...Meanwhile, he continued to make his picks with diversity foremost in mind...
...The Post, hopelessly if willfully confused, said diversity doesn't mean quotas...
...And there was no definition of "diversity," although diversity can be defined many different ways—in terms of religion, geography, ideology, not just race...
...I'll say...
...Journalists have to pick and choose, and they often are as much in the dark as the public they claim to serve...
...The press did not question the sincerity of Clinton's bean-counting remarks, if only because it has long played the same two-faced game...
...The 10-percent set-aside was just such a debate-avoiding late addition...
...The press was seconding Clinton in his doubletalk while declaring diversity an unproblematic good not requiring definition...
...What a wonderful opportunity for the new administration...
...the Department of Energy...
...In the November AALS newsletter, she defended the University of California at Berkeley's law school admissions policy, which had been criticized by the Bush Education Department...
...Still, I would argue that the kind of fishy law-making Lippman reported (I'll give him this much: I saw no other news story on the set-aside) ought routinely to attract press attention, if only because items tacked on late in the legislativegame are often ones their sponsors do not want debated in public...
...Beware the new math of Bill Clinton...
...The applications of these "minority" students were separated from those of all other students, and comparisons were made only within each group...
...The provision, as Lippman summarized it, "requires that at least 10 percent of all federal contracts for energy conservation in government buildings, purchase of natural gas-powered vehicles and energy research and development be awarded to small businesses owned by minorities or women, to historically black colleges or to universities whose student body is more than 20 percent Hispanic or American Indian...
...The piece was less journalism than ad copy (indeed, it ran on the Post's "Federal Page"), about a provision added in the final stages to the voluminous Energy Policy Act of 1992, which was signed into law in late October...
...But few journalists bothered, for example, to check out such figures as Emma Jordan, a law professor assigned to a most critical civil rights spot—the office of attorney general...
...Granted, it was a busy time, the press can only cover so much, and the actual nominees were the big stories...
...During December and January, just whom Clinton would appoint to what position dominated the news, and dominating those decisions was Clinton's goal of "diversity," defined in terms of those "forbidden factors...
...Jordan, president of the Association of American Law Schools, has definite views on quotas...
...Thus, in its Christmas Day coverage of Clinton's final cabinet selections, the Post said the President-elect had selected "the most diverse Cabinet in history...
...Clinton's remarks—"his most animated comments since his election," according to one story—led the news...
...Thus, the lead just as easily could have been: "President-elect Clinton, who has opposed racial quotas, may find himself at odds with a provision in the recently enacted Energy Policy Act of 1992...
...The policy reserved 23-27 percent of the seats in each entering class for "black, Chicano, Asian-American, and Native American" students...
...I happened to write a column (December 22 for the Washington Times) relating Miss Jordan's views...
...If Bill Clinton further tilts executive-branch enforcement in favor of measures that allocate jobs 'and other benefits on the basis of race and sex, will the press report it, and before the end of this century...
...It simply means you have to pay attention to "forbidden factors," apparently the latest euphemism for aggrieved groups that enjoy official sanction...
...T he open secret, of course, is that the press generally supports such measures and thus in effect colludes with politicians who advance them...
...The main reason the Supreme Court upheld a 1977 minority set-aside law (another Conyers special) was that Congress had made a finding of past discrimination, which served as an adequate remedial "predicate," as the lawyers call it...
...Then there's the question of the press's skimpy coverage of civil rights policies, whether set-aside laws (a congressional staple in recent years) or the executive branch's support for racial and gender preferences...
...The Labor Department's practice of "race-norming"the results of the General Aptitude Test Battery Examination began in 1281 but was not reported until 1990...
...During all the bean counting, reporters ignored the people handling civil rights law for the transition...
...ethnicity, and gender...
...The Legal Times's Stuart Taylor decided to follow up on it, and reported that the American Civil Liberties Union's "Blueprint for Action for the Clinton Administration" even urged Clinton to revive race-norming...
...As Lippman observed, the idea "was hardly mentioned in all the months of hearings and floor debates over nuclear power, offshore oil drilling, and expanded use of natural gas"—the main stuff in the bill...
...There were no quotes around the word "diverse...
...But Lippman doesn't seem remotely aware of these contentious points...
...Obviously, the press can't report on every new law or effort at enforcement...
...The move was supposedly akin to the one he made against Sister Souljah during the campaign, a signal to anti-quota Americans that he was still against quotas...
...The set-aside in the new energy bill is therefore ripe for a lawsuit on constitutional grounds...
...What we have here is a perfect example of a policy more commonly called a "set-aside," not that Lippman ever uses the term...
...The set-aside was the work of Michigan Democrat John Conyers, who "had no particular interest in energy as such," according to Lippman's congressional sources, and who "kept quiet so as not to arouse opposition from legislators opposed to affirmative action 'quotas.'" Certainly there's a role for journalism in exposing efforts to make law with no one noticing...
...To the contrary, let's "energize" minorities' objectives...
...But Candidate Clinton had also espoused an anti-quota view...
...His piece is disturbing in several ways...
...Lippman could only have assumed that the set-aside in question was either not a quota or hardly newsworthy even if it was...
...Consider Lippman's lead paragraph: President-elect Clinton, who has espoused a policy of racial inclusion and said he wants his administration to resemble the ethnic composition of the nation as a whole, may find a useful tool for achieving those objectives in...
...The first concerns press coverage of government...
...M y text this month comes from a story by Thomas W. Lippman that ran in the Washington Post on December 1. The headline, "Energizing Minorities' Objectives," and subhead, "Legislation Offers Opportunity for the Incoming Administration," set the tone...
...With advocates like Jordan and the ACLU, one can only imagine the shape the new administration's civil rights policies—which will probably affect a majority of Americans—will take...
...The distinction is important...
...71...
...Kemp had argued in a speech that Clinton would have a hard if not impossible time reconciling his commitment to "diversity" and his opposition to racial quotas and preferences...
Vol. 26 • March 1993 • No. 3
