The New York Times‘s Martin Arnold calls the success of Bernard Goldberg’s Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News “perhaps the most astonishing publishing event in the last 12 months.” I concur. A number-one best-seller is indeed an impressive accomplishment for a clumsily written screed whose author never even bothers to prove his thesis, much less attempts to convince anyone who does not already know the conservative secret handshake.
Never mind that in their more genuine moments, conservatives from William Kristol to Pat Buchanan admit that the claim of liberal media bias is bogus, cooked up for political advantage. Conservative book buyers, fortunately for Goldberg, are rather late in getting the news. “Just turn on your TV set and it’s there,” the author, a twenty-eight-year veteran at CBS News, declares. In doing so, he echoes the line of many a know-nothing conservative before him. “There are certain facts of life so long obvious they would seem beyond dispute. One of these–that there is a liberal tilt in the media…,” sayeth the editors of the Wall Street Journal. “The fact is everybody knows that Dan Rather is an egomaniacal liberal. Everybody knows that the major news networks lean to the left,” chimes in Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online. Never mind, dear reader, that young Jonah was recently signed up by CNN, where he joins liberal Robert Novak and liberal Tucker Carlson as a regular commentator on what Tom DeLay calls the “Communist News Network.” He can expect to compete with liberal lunatic Alan Keyes on MSNBC, who replaces liberal criminal Oliver North and liberal miniskirt model Laura Ingraham, and joins liberal carnival barker Chris Matthews, in being given his own show on that liberal network. Thank goodness for the fairandbalanced folks at Fox.
Taking time out from the 200-300 talk-radio programs that regularly feature authors of the conservative publishing house Regnery, which published his book, Goldberg appeared on Jeff Greenfield’s Communist CNN program, where he told his host, “I could give you right now, Jeff, about 100 examples of liberal bias in the media that are current.” Yet over the course of 230 pages, he manages to string together little more than one idiotic accusation after another. Goldberg reports, “Everyone to the right of Lenin is a ‘right-winger’ as far as media elites are concerned.” He explains that the news bias comes from the same “dark region that produces envy and the unquenchable liberal need to wage class warfare.” He insists, “If CBS News were a prison instead of a journalistic enterprise, three-quarters of the producers and 100 per cent of the vice-presidents would be Dan’s bitches.” Just about the only piece of actual news Goldberg produces is unproven and, I’m guessing, imaginary. According to the author, CBS News president Andrew Heyward once told him: “Look, Bernie, of course there’s a liberal bias in the news. All the networks tilt left…. If you repeat any of this, I’ll deny it.”
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Taking the conservative ideology of wealthy white male victimization to new heights, Goldberg pretends he has broken his pledge of omertà and suffered the horrifying consequences. He wrote an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal attacking his colleagues. “So what happened?” he writes. “Well, as Tony Soprano might put it to his old pal Big Pussy Bompensiero in the Bada Bing! Lounge: Bernie G. opened his mouth to the wrong people–and he got whacked.”
It’s heartbreaking until you discover that while Goldberg admits that Heyward had every right to fire him for violating the terms of his contract, instead the boss whom “Bernie G.” is either betraying or libeling in these pages found him a nice cushy job at 60 Minutes II and allowed him to serve out his time to qualify for a higher pension. Call me a liberal, but I believe the term “whack” carries a slightly different connotation among Mafia dons.
As for Dan’s “bitches,” this is likely a fantasy as well. The anchorman, according to Goldberg, “practically kissed Fidel Castro in front of the whole evening news staff when the dictator showed up at CBS News studios.” Did I mention that Goldberg (though he’ll probably deny it) “practically” beat my dog, raped my cat and exposed himself to a potted plant in front of the entire Nation staff? He “practically” did all this, by the way, before “practically” admitting that his book was cooked up in a few spare minutes to milk money from ignorant people willing to pay to see their prejudices confirmed. Go ahead, Bernie, “whack” me; baby needs a new pair of shoes.
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Speaking of liberals, George Will offered up yet another example recently of why the word “journalist” is considered so vicious an epithet among social scientists. Will has long been obsessed with education spending, which he finds wasteful and counterproductive. This leads him to twist arguments and statistics so shamelessly that one of his columns actually served as the subject of an article in the Journal of Statistics Education demonstrating how not to analyze SAT data.
Will’s most recent foray into the topic is an almost perfect rewrite of a column he wrote a year ago. Writing on the Bear Left website (www.bear-left.com), Tim Francis-Wright notes that the College Board website contains at least three pages of warnings to journalists seeking to use state-level data, which Will ignores. He not only abuses the figures to denigrate the effects of investing in education, he constructs his entire argument on precisely two data points: test scores as reported by North Dakota and the District of Columbia. The divorced pundit distorts the implications of this tiny, intellectually immaterial comparison to support his own biased belief in strong nuclear families as the key determinant of educational success. Surprise, surprise.
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And speaking of the liberals at Enron, I could not follow this story were it not for the energetic reporting of the folks at Media Whores Online (www.mediawhoresonline.com) and the thoughtful analysis at Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo website (www.j-marshall.com/talk). Check ’em out.
