Bias: Book Critic at Play #2

Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How Media Distorts the News, by Bernard Goldberg
Goldberg was a CBS News reporter and, later, correspondent, for twenty-eight years. In 1996, he wrote published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he pointed out that the mainstream news media (CBS specifically, but also NBC and ABC) had a liberal bias. This op-ed touched off a firestorm, and everyone from Dan Rather and his producer on down to the lowliest newsroom staffer was either extremely angry (betrayed) by Goldberg’s act or at the very least pretended not to know him. How dare he? Goldberg says that he had done the worst thing possible, and he relates some extremely outrageous comments from Rather (whom he calls The Dan and speaks of as a godfather character whose words mean the very opposite of what they seeem to mean) and from Andrew Heyward, the CBS Evening News producer (who, when Goldberg said he had not pointed out in the editorial that Heyward had often agreed with Goldberg that there is a liberal bias, said “That would have been like raping my wife and kidnapping my kids!”). Goldberg’s editorial, which is reproduced in the appendix, criticizes a “Reality Check” segment by a reporter named Eric Engberg, in which then-presidential candidate Steve Forbes’s flat tax is referred to as “wacky” (among other things), and uses that segment as a springboard for pointing out the media’s liberal bias. His criticism of the segment is deserved, and the piece is fairly well-written. In the beginning of the book, which he wrote five years later, after weathering the storm and staying with CBS long enough to earn his pension (a fact he shares late in the book), he goes in-depth with this thesis—but only after some seriously sensationalistic tale-telling. If you can get past the News Mafia conceit, there is some interesting critique. Goldberg points out that the bias is not as simple as giving democrats a pass and grilling republicans (good, because we know that the media doesn’t do either of those things). He suggest that it is insidious, and thus harder to fight. The example he uses at first—and the strongest example he has to offer—lies in how the news anchors label those they bring into the studio for comment. Conservatives are labeled as such (conservative think-tank such and such); liberals are just identified by job title (NOW president so and so). This is a valid point, I think. I have noticed anchors say something like “and for a comment from the right, here’s…” and not introduce left-wingers as clearly (or identify them at all). Goldberg suggests that this is because the media elites (as he calls them—shades of Ann Coulter, or maybe her rhetoric features shades of Bernard Goldberg) don’t see liberals as liberal—they see the liberal viewpoint as simply… reasonable (his italics). His point, ultimately, is that the media elites are liberals and they allow their personal perspectives to color how they present the news. Well, all right. Let’s grant that for a moment. This muckraking whistleblower then makes some interesting leaps: the country is vastly conservative; network heads are liberal; working mothers are the cause of many of society’s ills. I question the first; I believe we are mostly centrist at heart. Or rather we want what we want; we want personal satisfaction, and if others don’t get in the way of that, we don’t much care what they’re up to. The idea that network heads are liberal is… entertaining, especially when Goldberg himself points out that the moment news began to go wrong, to lose its integrity, its willingness to tackle new issues, is when network heads realized that news could make money. So he connects the dots from money to content choices, but still blames the media elites’ liberalism for their softheadedness. Further, he claims that he is criticizing liberal bias, and he even asks some good questions about why certain stories are left untold, but parts of the book are criticisms not of media but of human behavior and life choices (daycare is a big one). Goldberg may have a point about media bias, but it’s buried in a whole lot of anger and political bias of his very own. (book cover c Perennial Library, 2003)