By Tim Wise
As a general rule, one should regard with a mountain of salt anything to be found on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Committed to the promotion of right-wing economics and social policy, and unburdened by such mundane requirements as fact checking, the writers of the Journal’s daily screeds have long taken liberty with supposedly sacrosanct journalistic principles like truth. To wit, their utterly fallacious hit job on the Community Reinvestment Act back in September, in which they blamed the subprime mortgage meltdown–and virtually the entire economic crisis–on black and brown poor folks who received loans for which they were unqualified thanks to liberal reforms. A few months later, the generally splendid and fair-minded news reporters at the Journal utterly debunked the claims that the CRA had been the cause of the problem, but this mattered not to the editorial staff. They never printed a retraction for their wrong-headedness. Dishonesty in the pursuit of Austrian economics is no vice, apparently.
This week, the Journal was at it again, taking their reactionary mendacity to new heights, as they weighed in on the “reverse discrimination” case being considered by the Supreme Court. To hear the editors tell it–and this is a position advanced by conservative radio and even some mainstream journalists–Frank Ricci and his seventeen co-plaintiffs were the victims of unfair “racial preferences” for blacks in the New Haven, Connecticut fire department. Although they had scored highly enough on their supervisor exams to be promoted to one of several open positions for lieutenant or captain, the test was ultimately tossed out, supposedly because no black test-takers had earned a score that would have qualified them for such a promotion. Decrying the blatant racial balancing that such an action is interpreted to signify, the right has been portraying Ricci, et al. as the latest poster children for white victimization. As the Journal explained it on April 22 (the day the Court heard oral arguments in the case) “the plaintiffs deserve to have the law applied equally-whatever the color of their skin.”
Not only was the decision by New Haven authorities unfair generally, according to this narrative, but it was especially injurious to Mr. Ricci, who, the New York Times informs us gave up a second job so he could study “up to thirteen hours a day,” and who, because of his dyslexia, “paid an acquaintance to read textbooks onto tapes” for him, and who practiced day and night, using flashcards to help him remember the minutiae that would no doubt find its way onto the test. Ricci scored sixth out of seventy-seven firefighters who took the exam, and would have stood a good chance of obtaining one of the leadership positions had the test been certified by officials in New Haven.
Although one is free to disagree with the decision to throw out the test, before reaching such a conclusion it would help to know the facts–all of them–behind the case. Sadly, one will not glean such information from the snippets provided thus far in the news, or from the blatantly inaccurate account in the Journal editorial. Though they suggest, “the facts of Ricci are not in dispute,” nothing could be further from the truth. They are, and the facts as articulated by the Wall Street Journal couldn’t be more incorrect.
Facts of the Case: What Ricci is and Isn’t About
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