What Liberal Media? | 1, 2, 3, 4

Bias-ed Against The Facts

ERNARD GOLDBERG'S book Bias suffers from many of the same weaknesses as Coulter's, though he lacks her colorful flair for murderous invective. Still Bias proved a smashing success. The New York Times' publishing columnist, Martin Arnold, termed its sales to be "the most astonishing publishing event in the last 12 months." Indeed, with its publisher claiming more than 440,000 copies in print, the book's sales figures alone are taken by many to be evidence of the truth of its argument. In many ways, the conservative side was hardly better served in its arguments by Goldberg than by Coulter.

To those who do not already share Goldberg's biases, his many undocumented, exaggerated assertions have the flavor of self-parody rather than reasoned argument. Among these are such statements as: "Everybody to the right of Lenin is a 'right-winger' as far as media elites are concerned." Opposition to the flat-tax, he claimes, comes from the same "dark region that produces envy and the seemingly unquenchable liberal need to wage class warfare." Roughly 72 of the 232 pages of Bias are devoted to attacks or score-settling with Dan Rather, whom Goldberg believes to have ruined his career. "If CBS News were a prison instead of a journalistic enterprise, three-quarters of the producers and 100 percent of the vice-presidents would be Dan's bitches."

Much of the rest of Bias consists of blasts at unnamed liberals who are accused of exaggerating data and manipulating the truth for their own purposes. How strange, therefore, that Goldberg seeks to make his case with statements about: "America's 10-trillion-page tax code," tuition fees that are "about the same as the cost of the space shuttle," and Laurence Tribe's "10 million" appearances on CBS News during the 1980s.

Taking the conservative ideology of wealthy white-male victimization to hitherto unimagined heights, Goldberg employs an extended Mafia metaphor to describe his departure from CBS. He speaks of having broken his pledge of "omerta" by writing an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal attacking his colleagues. "So what happened?" he writes. "Well, as Tony Soprano might put it to his old pal Pussy Bompensiero in the Bada Bing! Lounge: Bernie G. opened his big mouth to the wrong people -- and he got whacked." You believe this heartbreaking tale until you discover that CBS had every right to fire him for violating the terms of his contract by attacking the network news program in a public forum. Instead, his superiors found him a comfortable job where he was allowed to quietly qualify for a higher pension. (On "The Sopranos," and indeed, in most Mafia lore, the term "to whack" carries rather different connotations, as evidenced by Big Pussy's undisturbed slumber with "the fishes.")

During the course of over 220 pages of complaining, Goldberg never bothers to systematically prove the existence of liberal bias in the news, or even define what he means by the term. About as close as we get is: "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." A few of his examples, such as those involving corporate self-censorship in the event that a certain segment might offend the audience or advertisers, or the preference for interviewees with blonde hair and blue eyes over people of color, actually serve to make the opposite case. With a keen eye to his likely audience of conservative talk-show hosts and book-buyers, the author simply assumes the existence of a liberal bias in the media to be an undisputable fact.

This same undocumented assumption characterized the conservative celebration of the book. These writers considered the book's thesis to be beyond dispute The editors of The Wall Street Journal thundered: "There are certain facts of life so long obvious they would seem beyond dispute. One of these-that there is a liberal tilt in the media...." U.S. News and World Report columnist John Leo added, in praise of Bias, that "The reluctance of the news business to hold seminars and conduct investigations of news bias is almost legendary." Glenn Garvin, television critic of The Miami Herald added, "that newsrooms are mostly staffed by political liberals is pretty much beyond dispute, although a few keep trying to argue the point." That newspaper's executive editor, Tom Fielder, was said to be so impressed by Bias that he invited Goldberg to lunch with top members of his staff. He told Garvin, "I hate to say there's a political correctness that guides us, but I think there is. We tend to give more credibility to groups on the liberal side of the spectrum than on the conservative side."

If, in an alternative universe, all of Goldberg's claims somehow turned out to be justified, the crux of his argument would nevertheless constitute a remarkably narrow indictment. Goldberg did not set out to prove a liberal bias across the entire media, nor even across all television news. He concerned himself only with the evening news broadcasts, and not even with politics, but with social issues. Moreover, he appears to have done little research beyond recounting his own experiences and parroting the complaints of a conservative newsletter published by Brent Bozell's Media Research Center. It is hard to see what so excited conservative readers about the book. The broadcasts in question represent a declining share of viewers' attention, and increasingly, an old and, at least from advertisers' standpoint, undesirable audience. It is possible that these particular news programs -- if not their very format -- will not survive the retirement ages of the current generation of anchors.

Goldberg appears to consider this fact, however, he attributes the relative decline in viewership of the network nightly news to viewer unhappiness with the widespread liberal bias he claims to have uncovered. "It's as if the Berlin Wall had come down," he explains. "But instead of voting with their feet, Americans began voting with their remote control devices. They haven't abandoned the news. Just the news people they no longer trust.... How else can we account for Bill O'Reilly and The O'Reilly Factor on The Fox News Channel?... As far as I'm concerned, the three people Bill owes so much of his success to are Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather."

The logic of the above argument is genuinely difficult to fathom. Goldberg is correct to note that all three networks have seen a significant decline in their ratings for their news programs. But so has just about everything on network programming, due quite obviously to the enormous rise in viewer choice -- the result of the replacement of a three-network television universe with one that features hundreds of choices on cable and satellite TV and the Internet. Viewership for all four networks -- ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox -- during the ratings period Sept. 24, 2001 to March 3, 2002, for instance, made up only 43 percent of TV watchers, compared with more than twice that percentage for just three networks two decades earlier. Still the network news programs' numbers remained impressive. The combined audience of the three network news programs is well over 30 million Americans, and better than 15 times the number tuning into Mr. O'Reilly. It is also more than 10 times the combined total prime-time audience for Fox News Channel, CNN and MSNBC. These ratios render Goldberg's logic entirely nonsensical. Had he -- or anyone related to the book -- had enough respect for his readers to bother with even 10 minutes of research, this claim would have never made it into print.

Not all of Goldberg's arguments are quite as easy to disprove, but most are no less false or misleading. One of the claims that many critics and television interviewers have considered the strongest in the book was the one the author credited with having inspired his initial interest in the topic:

[N]ot because of my conservative views, but because what I saw happening violated my liberal sense of fair play. Why, I kept wondering, do we so often identify conservatives in our stories, yet rarely identify liberals? Over the years, I began to realize that this need to identify one side but not the other is a central component of liberal bias. There are right-wing Republicans and right-wing Christians and right-wing radio talk show hosts. The only time we journalists use the term "left-wing" is if we're talking about a part on an airplane.

Goldberg illustrates his point with an example taken from the Clinton impeachment proceedings, during which, he claims, Peter Jennings identified senators as they came to sign their names in the oath book. According to Goldberg, Jennings described Mitch McConnell of Kentucky as a "very determined conservative;" Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania as "one of the younger members of the Senate, Republican, very determined conservative;" and Bob Smith of New Hampshire as "another very, very conservative Republican," but did not describe liberals accordingly. Goldberg also complained that CBS identifies the radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon as a "noted law professor" while Phyllis Schlafly is a "conservative spokeswoman." Rush Limbaugh, says Goldberg, is the "conservative radio talk show host" but Rosie O'Donnell is not described as the liberal TV talk show host. "Robert Bork is the 'conservative' judge. But liberal Laurence Tribe, who must have been on CBS Evening News 10 million times in the 1980s" is identified simply as a "Harvard law professor."

Well, it would be interesting if true. And many of even the sharpest so-called liberal media critics of Goldberg's book assumed it to be true, perhaps out of the mistaken belief that he must have done at least this much research. Both Howard Kurtz and Jeff Greenfield failed to challenge it on CNN. Jonathan Chait accepted it in his extremely critical cover story on the book in The New Republic, but then went on to explain why, aside from liberal bias, it might be the case. And the then-Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, Tom Goldstein, writing in The Columbia Journalism Review mocked Goldberg's ad hominem claims but nevertheless credited Goldberg for "get[ting] down to specifics... [that] have the ring of truth" on this point. In fact, all were overly generous. Goldberg presents no testable evidence and his arguments bear little relationship to the truth. At a 2002 book store appearance broadcast on C-SPAN, a political science professor asked Goldberg something almost no television interviewer had bothered to inquire: Did he have any systematic data to back up this point? The author scoffed at the very idea of evidence. "I didn't want this to be written from a social scientist point of view," Goldberg explained. "I have total confidence that the point here is accurate."

Let me say this. And I want to say this as clearly as I can. You are dead wrong. Dead wrong. Not even close about Teddy Kennedy. You have not, almost every time they mention his name, heard "liberal." I will say this -- you have heard the word "liberal" almost never mentioned when they say his name, on the evening newscasts. They just don't. That part -- I mean you gave me an easy one, and I appreciate that. It doesn't happen.

Goldberg seems to think that such statements become true by emphatic repetition. In fact, they are testable, and it is Bernard Goldberg who is "dead wrong." On the small, almost insignificant point of whom Peter Jennings identified with what label on a single broadcast, Goldberg's point is a partial and deliberately misleading, half-truth. As the liberal Daily Howler Web site pointed out, "the incident occurred on Jan. 7, 1999, and Jennings did not identify 'every conservative' as the senators signed the oath book." He identified only three of them as such, failing to offer the label of conservative to such stalwarts as Senators Gramm, Hatch, Helms, Lott, Mack, Thurmond, Lugar, Stevens, Thompson and Warner. Most of the labels had nothing to do with politics and were peppered with personal asides about a given senator's age, interests or personality.

On the larger point regarding a liberal bias in the labeling of conservatives, but not liberals, Goldberg could hardly be more wrong, even using the very examples he proposes. For instance, Ted Kennedy does not appear on the news with much frequency, but during the first six months of 2001, when he did, it was almost always accompanied by the word "liberal." As for the "million" respectful references to Laurence Tribe that appeared without the appendage "liberal," the indefatigable Howler checked those as well. According to LEXIS, Howler found that Tribe has appeared on the CBS Evening News just nine times since 1993, almost always identified with a liberal label. On one occasion, May 14, 1994, CBS News even used Tribe and Robert Bork together, described as "legal scholars from both ends of the political spectrum."

The above anecdotes are reinforced by some careful research on the topic by Geoffrey Nunberg of the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University and its department of linguistics.

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