August 8, 2009

A review of Bernard Goldberg's book, Bias
Goldberg copyrighted the book in 2001. He wrote a short foreword mentioning that network TV news did a pretty good job with the Sept 11 attacks, but that this was an anomaly. He clearly wrote most of it before the attacks, and the event that focused him on the project occurred in 1996. He was a reporter and presenter for CBS, working with Dan Rather pretty much from the inception of the evening news show as entertainment, and as a profit vehicle rather than a public service. Years in the industry, and close working relationships with most of the names in it lend him considerable authority as an observer. His history offers weight to his premise that the nation's conservatives do in this case have a valid claim, that news presentation as a whole in the USA has a liberal bias.
The author makes the point that during his tenure in news during the 1970s and 80s he frequently made suggestions, in a low key manner, when he saw opinion creeping into broadcasts presented as news. But he didn't make an issue of it, and was courteously ignored. Then, in 1996, a building contractor who was doing work for him called to point out a CBS "news" piece which was so blatantly opinionated that he found it insulting. Goldberg took a look at the show, and had to agree. He brought it up with his colleagues. They told him he was imagining things. He wrote a carefully constructed editorial , pointing out the clear bias in the show, and suggested that the industry needed to examine itself. Viewer ratings were dropping, and he attributed it to loss of trust, as the audience saw a lack of balance. The Wall Street Journal published the editorial, and he became an instant pariah, not just at CBS, but across the networks. The backlash seemed entirely out of proportion. They did indeed protest too much. Nobody attacked or contested the logic or the evidence. They savaged the messenger. He managed to hang on to his job…sort of…for several more years, but his career was on ice.
Goldberg's writing style, I think, may suffer a bit from being a TV script man. When the presentation is aural, points probably need to be made several times, to be sure they didn't slip past the viewer at a moment of inattention. When the case is written on a page, though, the reader moves at a pace that's comfortable, and can review at will. The book's text tends to beat the point to death at times, so that eventually I found myself breaking into "skim" mode to move on to the next point after having been bombarded with sufficient examples. But despite the repetitious sections, and the author's obvious outrage at his treatment, the case is made based on logic. It's not ideological justification, and aside from part of the motive clearly being emotional blowback, every point is upheld by clear, defined logic applied to documented examples.
The basic thesis of the book is that the reporters, editors and presenters honestly believe they are presenting the unvarnished facts, because it is part of the mechanics of the brain to discard as irrelevant that which is not believed. Every study, every poll in the last 30 years shows that the news media is staffed by people who, 3 to 1, describe themselves as liberals, or progressives. Goldberg himself has argued and voted along those ideological lines since Nixon was in the White House. But he is willing to submit that the conservatives truly believe what they say, and have a right to publish it in the context of the national debate, which the media is intended to provide. He and one of his supporters make a good case that right wing talk radio could never have achieved popularity and power without the mainstream media having destroyed its own credibility. It's a good point.
Early in my reading I found a good excuse for myself not having recognized the level of the problem; I have rarely owned a TV since 1970. I have seen so little of the evening news since Walter Cronkite retired that I couldn't put a face on the presenters he cites. And when I started reading newspapers, I read ALL the editorials. Safire and Brooks and Buckley as well as Freidman and Krugman. And if I hadn't learned to read news with skepticism by 2002, I developed a permanently raised eyebrow reading the New York Times in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. My BS detector must have been working pretty well; Cheney's moles are no longer on the staff, and barely escaped prosecution. But I didn't see it as a systemic problem until I read Goldberg's book. He cites a couple of cases that absolutely enrage me….but they didn't enrage the nation because the newsroom staff didn't see them as controversial, and cut them out, or DID present them as so controversial that there was no need to judge their importance . Their opinion determined how they were presented, or whether they were presented at all. I don't think the book has actually made much of a change in the news (or general TV programming) culture in the ensuing 8 years, but it helps develop a perspective from which to view the media. It's worth a look. Ted