BOOKS
The Goldberg Disputations
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Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News Bernard Goldberg |
The touchy topic of media bias was first quantified in 1937 by Leo Rosten, who examined the character and background of the Washington press corps in The Washington Correspondents. Rosten, better remembered for his later book, The Joys of Yiddish, found that journalists were liberal, and just about every study since then has confirmed his findings.
But no study, not even the oft-cited Media Elite, the 1986 book by S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda S. Lichter, has shown that the personal backgrounds and values of journalists are particularly relevant to how journalists report the news.
Bias, a surprise best seller by Bernard Goldberg, a onetime CBS
correspondent, buys into the iffy research promulgated by the
Lichters and Rothman.
His chatty, highly anecdotal book picks up where he left off in
1996 when he breached professional etiquette and attacked another
CBS correspondent in an op-ed column for The Wall Street Journal.
In that op-ed column, he criticized a CBS Evening News feature by colleague Eric Engberg, on the presidential candidate Steve Forbes's flat tax, as setting "new standards for bias." Reading the transcript of that segment, called "Reality Check," six years later suggests that it is a tongue-in-cheek skewering of a candidate who ran his campaign by purchasing advertising to get his points across. The segment in question begins with a sound bite from Forbes, displaying no small measure of hyperbole in promulgating the flat tax: "We would see a Renaissance the likes of which has never been seen before." With similar hyperbole, Engberg goes about trying to puncture that statement.
That deeply offended Goldberg, who, with his own hyperbole, noted in his op-ed that "the old argument that the networks and other 'media elites' have a liberal bias is so blatantly true that it's hardly worth discussing any-more." (Goldberg's thesis resonates deeply and lastingly with the editorial page of the Journal. In fact, in the lead editorial of its first paper of this year, the Journal, in an editorial "Bernie Non Grata," praised the author.)
In his book, he elaborates on his op-ed point, offering rhetorical assertions like these:
"I said out loud what millions of TV news viewers all over America know and have been complaining about for years: that too often, Dan and Peter and Tom and a lot of their foot soldiers don't deliver the news straight, that they have a liberal bias, and that no matter how often the network stars deny it, it is true."
When Goldberg is less polemical and gets down to specifics — such as the media's tendency to identify conservatives as conservatives but not liberals as liberals — some of his charges have the ring of truth.
In one chapter, he argues that television misled its audience about homelessness — how "homelessness ended the day Bill Clinton was sworn in as president" — a big coincidence "since it pretty much began the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president." In another chapter he accuses reporters of spreading the "myth of heterosexual AIDS" in reports that emphasized the politically correct message that everybody — not just gays and drug addicts — can get AIDS, one more example, as Goldberg sees it, of journalists "letting their compassion get in the way of their reporting." In still another chapter, he ridicules the dismay at CBS when the field producer of a report on Alabama prisons turned in a videotape of a twenty-man chain gang, nineteen of whom were black. The "idiotic" order from the liberal senior producer, as Goldberg retells it: Get more pictures of white criminals next time.
Goldberg is on less sure footing when he goes ad hominem. He is particularly rough on his one-time friend and boss, CBS anchor Dan Rather — whom, when he is not calling him just plain "Dan," he irritatingly labels "The Dan." Rather, of course — portrayed here as ruthless, self-centered, and unforgiving — has been a favorite target of the right for nearly two decades, so much so that a few years after he became anchor, rumblings began that Jesse Helms was going to engineer a takeover of CBS merely to become his boss and get rid of him.
Of Rather's boss, Andrew Heyward, the president of CBS News, Goldberg writes that in a face-to-face conversation, Heyward told him "of course there's a liberal bias in the news. All the networks tilt left." Goldberg's rank hearsay continues: He writes that while publicly chastising Goldberg for "a real breach of our fundamental trust," Heyward admitted to him privately that the Engberg piece had represented "a conspiracy of fuck-ups." With the odd logic, if not clairvoyance, characteristic of many arguments made in the book, Goldberg concludes that what Heyward "didn't say, not explicitly anyway, was that they let it on the air precisely because they didn't see anything wrong with it."
An even bigger problem is that nowhere does Goldberg show any causal link between reporters' political prejudices and their coverage. Indeed, he ignores studies showing that while journalists are centrists, or left-leaning on social issues, they are right-leaning on economic ones. Nowhere does Goldberg try to reconcile his thesis with the opposing belief that mass media content reflects the ideology of those who finance the media, who are generally more conservative than their employees.
These deficiencies do not seem to have discouraged book buyers.
For a while, Bias was perched on top of The New York Times bestseller
list ("perhaps the most astonishing publishing event in the
last twelve months," wrote Martin Arnold, publishing columnist
of the paper, in January), far outselling a slew of recently published,
more rigorous books examining contemporary journalism.
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