Book Review: Liberal bias in the media is old news

Ed. tells me that quoting oneself is poor form. [It's narcissistic. Ed.] Nevertheless, I want to lead off with the penultimate sentence of my earlier post today. Liberal bias is pervasive in the meeja, the civil service, and the schools of not just Canada, but the USA, the UK, and indeed just about every country of the Western world. This is not fake news. Nor is it new news. It's something Bernard Goldberg discovered in February of 1996 when he wrote an editorial for the Wall Street Journal entitled "Networks Need a Reality Check".

In the piece, Mr Goldberg accused his employers at CBS, and in particular the editors of CBS Evening News, reporter Eric Engberg and then-anchor Dan Rather of a profound liberal bias. He wrote: "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. 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."

The reaction to this CLM [Career-Limiting Move. Ed.] was swift, vicious and totally predictable. Mr Goldberg failed to follow "Walt's Rules for Survival in a PC World", as set forth in "Government publishes censorship checklist - comply or else!", WWW 11/6/19, yet he seems to have been taken by surprise to find himself defamed and in danger of being defenestrated. He tells all in Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News (Regnery Publishing 2002), which Walt recommends.

To quote from the dust jacket synopsis [Getting lazy? Ed.]:
If you've suspected your nightly news is slanted to the left, it's far worse than you think.... Bernard Goldberg reveals a corporate news culture in which the close-mindedness is breathtaking, journalistic integrity has been pawned to liberal opinion, and "entertainment" trumps hard news every time.... As the author reveals, "liberal bias" doesn't mean simply being hard on Republicans and easy on Democrats. Real media bias is the result of how those in the media see the world -- and their bias directly affects how we all see the world.

You can skip over the first two chapters, which are a rehash of Mr Goldberg's feud with Dan Rather, now also in the realm of old news. Start reading in earnest at Chapter 3, "The Emperor is Naked". The examples are dated, but the truths are as fresh as this morning, for, since the election of Still-President Trump, the bias has broadened and deepened exponentially. If you doubt me, just watch The View. [Oh please! Not that! Ed.]

Let me quote just this one passage, from Chapter 13, "The Ship Be Sinking":
Right after my op-ed came out, Mike Wallace was asked..."What is your reaction to CBS News reporter Bernard Goldberg's charges of liberal bias in the media?"
     Mike replied, "When people suggest there is a bias in the media and we have all this power and then of course the bias is always supposed to be liberal and not conservative, well then, under those circumstances how many Democratic presidents and how many Republican presidents have there been beginning with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan twice, George Bush. It's just in my estimation, it's almost a joke."
     I think Mike Wallace is great, but in this case the joke's on him.

Just because Americans, starting in 1980, elected Republicans president four times...and Democrats only two times...doesn't prove, as Mike seems to think, that there's no liberal bias. A more likely explanation is that TV news viewers simply aren't influenced by the bias they're being fed from network anchors and reporters whom they lost trust in a long time ago.
     Besides, the problem of bias is not that the big network news divisions are reliably pro-Democratic...or even predictably anti-Republican. It's about how they frame the big issues of the day -- feminism, abortion, race, affirmative action, even taxes. On these issues they are reliably and predictably left of center.

Mr. Bloomberg wrote those words in 2002. Fast forward to 2016 and witness how Donald J. Trump won the election against the concerted opposition of Hollywood, the lamestream media, and all right-thinking (read: left-thinking) people on both coasts. Only Middle America supported The Donald, and he's president today, and will be president tomorrow, and so on until January of 2025. (Lifetime pct .986.) Mr Goldberg, who is now where he belongs (with Fox!) must be tired of saying "I told you so!"