'You give us 22 minutes - we'll give you slanted news' Jerusalem Post By Elliot Jager (January 28) - BIAS: A CBS Insider Describes How the Media Distort the News - by Bernard Goldberg (Regnery). 234 pages. Television is capable of accurately reporting breaking news. But liberal bias sets in once the dust settles. This is a mean-spirited, angry book by a writer who has an axe to grind. I liked it. Bias is an attack on CBS television news - and by extension other US news outlets - for slanting the news in a liberal direction. It is also a get-even, set-the-record-straight rant by veteran reporter Bernard Goldberg against CBS for forcing him out of the job he loved. The book's villain is anchorman Dan Rather, portrayed as having stifled internal dissent and lost touch with his own blue-collar origins. While the book targets one US network in particular, the author's charges of slanted and irresponsible coverage will ring familiar to critics of television news globally. Goldberg, a New York City-born Jew, joined CBS News in 1972 at age 26 and slowly moved up the ranks. By 1996, when he broke the liberal code of silence and wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal which ultimately led to the end of his career, he had become one of the network's most respected correspondents. His career-busting op-ed charged: "The old argument that the networks and other 'media elites' have a liberal bias is so blatantly true that it's hardly worth discussing anymore. No, we don't sit around in dark corners and plan strategies on how we're going to slant the news. We don't have to. It comes naturally to most reporters." Goldberg doesn't explicitly define liberalism, except to say that "inevitably, reporters see the world a certain way... where money is often seen as a solution to social problems, where anti-abortionists are seen as kooks and weirdos, where groups, not just individuals, have rights - and because that's how they see things, that's also how they report the news." Several of the network bosses that Goldberg came up against are Jewish, but the Jewish angle runs deeper because, as academic Ruth Wisse says, "Jews are associated with liberalism the way the French are with wine." Goldberg's criticism implies that news coverage is premised upon the liberal idea that humans are basically good and that there is no absolute right or wrong. Liberals also hold that virtually all problems can be solved by negotiations, and deny the reality of evil or the idea of relentless conflict. MOST AMERICAN journalists are uniformly liberal, but Goldberg's own liberalism wasn't terminal. He lived in Florida, well away from the exclusive enclaves favored by the media elite, and was thus exposed to the concerns of regular folks like his handyman, who consistently brought Goldberg bias complaints. What finally propelled Goldberg - who had been trying to effect change from within - to go public was a blatantly slanted report, aired during the 2000 presidential campaign, about Steve Forbes' proposal to junk volumes of tax regulations for a simple flat-tax that all but the poorest would pay. Eric Engberg, the network's Washington correspondent, began his report by saying, "Steve Forbes pitches his flat-tax scheme as an economic elixir, good for everything that ails us." Engberg then found several pliable experts - an old reporter's trick - all of whom agreed that Forbes' idea was a "wacky" plan. The reason network honchos presented this editorial as news, says Goldberg, is because they were simply oblivious to their own bias, assuming that anyone who isn't liberal is out of the mainstream. Liberal manipulation, explains Goldberg, starts with semantics. Take the homeless problem. The real culprits behind US homelessness are mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, not housing, he says. Using the term "homelessness" made it sound like it was all Ronald Reagan's fault for cutting federal housing aid and turning the money over to the states to spend as they wanted. AIDS, says Goldberg, was manipulated into being everyone's problem when, in the developed world it is really - and almost exclusively - a problem for homosexuals and drug abusers or those who engage in sex with them. Liberal bias also affects how the networks cover a variety of other social and cultural issues. To be fair, Goldberg says he would also have spoken out against conservative bias - had he encountered it. GOLDBERG DEVOTES a hard-hitting chapter to the Arab war against Israel, giving readers perhaps their first exposure to problems of anti-Israel media bias. He takes liberals to task for, among other things, holding Jews to a different standard than other people; for insinuating a moral equivalence between Arab attacks against civilians and IDF retaliations against military targets, and for falsely portraying the Arabs as the "underdog." He also exposes a more subtle problem. Pundits have manipulated the post-September 11 coverage of Islamic terrorism by insisting, over and over again, that the WTC attack represented a subversion of Islam. News consumers are repeatedly distracted from the possibility that, just maybe, the massacre was simply "the result of an honest reading of the Koran." Amazingly, this iconoclastic whistle-blowing book almost didn't get published because several "mainstream" (read liberal) houses rejected the manuscript. Fortunately, Regnery (an unabashedly conservative publisher) took a chance on Goldberg's breezy first-person account of his battle against news manipulation. Their gamble paid off. Bias is this week's No. 1 New York Times bestseller. |
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