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Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes
How the Media Distort the News

(Bernard Goldberg)

(To order from Amazon, click on the dust jacket or the title. Link is to the paperback edition--different cover.)

The first 50 pages are a bit painful, for this is where Goldberg relates how he was mugged by Dan Rather and CBS for his treasonable act of writing an essay for the Wall Street Journal suggesting that television newscasters had a liberal bias. Of course he's upset! Who wouldn't be, when his career is in shambles after a generation of good, devoted, and generally liberal reporting. But I wish he'd put that story at the end of his book, not the beginning.

The real book begins at page 49, when Goldberg describes how he got there on the edge of the cliff. Perhaps the most telling proof of his thesis is the fact that, to be persuasive, he must first point out that he's a good Democrat who voted for George McGovern--twice. Later, when the book really gets rolling, Goldberg almost never quotes from conservative publications. Instead, he delves the most devastating stuff out of the New York Times, because he knows full well that his argument would be lost unless he could get liberal proof of his thesis.

My favorite chapter is "How Bill Clinton Cured Homelessness." Goldberg explains with icy detachment how the "homeless" were first discovered during the Reagan administration, and how both their reality and their numbers were shamelessly distorted by the evening news. (The best estimates put the homeless at between 230,000 and 600,000--mostly ex-convicts, substance abusers, mentally unbalanced, or a combination thereof. But television newscasters routinely spoke of 3 million, 6 million, and even 19 people without homes, most of them blond, blue-eyed, and generally just like us.) The crisis continued through the administration of George Bush the elder, of course. Then, miracle of miracles, Bill Clinton was elected and the problem all but vanished. In 1988, the New York Times published 50 stories about the homeless, with 5 of them appearing on the front page. In 1998, it published 10 stories about the homeless, none of them on the front page.

And so it goes. AIDS--the fake epidemic that was supposed to be killing millions of mainstream Americans, when in reality it afflicted intravenous drug users, gays, and their partners, along with the innocents who got it from tainted blood or their drug-addled moms. Day care--which probably harms children and for most families probably isn't necessary except to keep up their six-digit standard of living, but which can't be criticized because the working moms like it. Liberal hate speech--which goes unchallenged when the victim is somebody with the politics of, say, Jesse Helms or Clarence Thomas. And guy bashing--which amounts to the same thing.

Goldberg left CBS in May 2000. "They continue to slant the news," he writes now, "and then ... deny they're doing it. They are not lying. They just don't understand."