Bernie Goldberg is an interesting fellow. For those who don't know, he was a correspondent with the CBS News from 1972-2000. But on February 13, 1996, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by him arguing that the notion of "liberal bias in the media" was not only true, but that it was flagrantly illustrated by a recent report done by a reporter at his news organization.
Since that time, Goldberg has written two books: Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distorts the News, and Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite. (President Bush gave the book on Bias a nice plug by simply doing this.) The interesting thing about Goldberg is that he's not a conservative. He's never voted Republican in his life. But he's honest enough to call a spade a spade. He doesn't think that there's some vast liberal conspiracy in the media. Rather, he thinks that their elitisim has led to isolation and groupthink that is blind to their deep bias. Goldberg argues that they seek conservatism as "right wing," but liberalism as "mainstream"--not by intention per se, but because they can go weeks and months and even years without actually running into anyone friends or peers who hold to a conservative point of view. Most simply, they live in a bubble.
For example, Goldberg wrote in the Journal:
The old argument that the networks and other "media elites" have a liberal bias is so blatantly true that it's hardly worth discussing anymore. 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.
Well, this morning Goldberg is back in the op-ed pages of the Journal with a new piece on RatherGate. It's an interesting read. One interesting line. Goldberg says that Rather's follow-up pieces to the original 60 Minutes piece have been "so one-sided they'd get a junior-high journalism student an 'F' for lack of balance."
