ABSTRACT
Race and gender preferences are controversial, and honorable people can be found on both sides of the issue. The two opponents, who are trying to get the subject on the ballot in California, were portrayed as uninformed, fumbling, and perhaps deceptive members of a "beleaguered species." The men, Tom Wood (who has a doctorate in philosophy) and Glynn Custred (a professor of anthropology), were allowed to say that they want what Martin Luther King, Jr., wanted—an open, colorblind America. On Dateline, Wood denied that he and Custred "are in any sense political animals." Then Mankiewicz cut in with another McCarthyite "gotcha," saying the two are actually "key figures" in the National Association of Scholars, a group that is "hardly apolitical" since it is "very critical of many aspects of higher education, including black and women's studies sexual harassment policies..." The unconscious assumptions of the newsroom culture are surely part of the problem.
