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Jewish World Review Dec. 11, 2001 / 26 Kislev 5762

Linda Bowles

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Consumer Reports

Bernard Goldberg, like a good shrink, is helping end a dangerous case of 'denial'


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com -- Bernard Goldberg's new book, descriptively titled " Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News ," is based upon his 28 years as an insider at CBS News. The book is a blunt, excruciatingly detailed revelation of how the news is liberally handled at a major TV network.

The book could not have come at a worse time for mainstream media moguls. They are already gnashing teeth and developing eye tics, trying to suppress the deep resentment and keen disappointment they feel as a result of President Bush's success and popularity.

The best-selling book adds to the testy tensions in the usually staid, inner sanctums, not only of CBS but of NBC and ABC as well. They don't like being stripped bare in front of the nation. The truth hurts.

As Goldberg explains, "If I had worked at Firestone and blown the whistle on defective tires, 60 Minutes would have immortalized me. Unfortunately, the defective product I was making noise about wasn't tires. It was network news."

In 1996, unable to get anyone at CBS to listen to him, Goldberg tried to get his message across by publishing an article in The Wall Street Journal criticizing the flagrant liberal bias of a specific CBS Evening News story. Rather than deal with the real issue of biased news reporting at the network, CBS's Bob Schieffer attacked Goldberg: "People are just stunned. It's just such a wacky charge and a weird way to go about it. I don't know what Bernie was driving at. It just sounds bizarre."

The priggish leaders of CBS were unwilling to listen to constructive feedback in 1996. Even today, they doggedly persist in doing everything within their power to avoid a learning experience. Habituated to varnishing the truth about everything else, they will not or perhaps cannot accept the unvarnished truth about themselves.

Last July, CBS News President Andrew Heyward appeared on C-SPAN and responded to a question regarding network news bias: "Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I do deny that we have a bias ... " He accused his critics of being "activists and extremists of the Right."

Perhaps feeling some of the heat, NBC's Tom Brokaw self-righteously responded to Goldberg: " ... the idea that we would set out, consciously or unconsciously, to put some kind of an ideological framework over what we're doing is nonsense."

The human mind is notorious for accommodating itself. The most flagrant bigots in the world have totally rationalized their biases. They do not consider themselves bigoted; they consider other people uninformed. If the unsharpened minds of crass bigots are capable of these machinations, how much more effective in self-deception must be the sophisticated minds of elitist bigots? The theory holds true; it is clear the liberal media do not consider themselves ignobly biased about anything, but virtuously right about everything.

The way the news is selected and reported exposes liberal media biases about race, homosexuality, politics, religion, immigration, abortion, education, the environment and gun ownership. Many liberal decision-makers in the media, whether consciously or unconsciously, are clearly in the business of censoring out news they do not want the people to see or hear, while amplifying news which advances their undisclosed agendas.

When the liberal media want an opinion on women's issues, they rarely go to a conservative women's organization. They go to the National Organization for Women, a relatively small organization of females whose primary issues are lesbianism, liberalism and abortion.

If the television moguls, who are not averse to showing any other form of perversion, violence and mayhem, could find it in their conscience to show a partial-birth abortion in all its horrid detail, a law banning this heinous procedure for killing the unborn would be passed and signed within weeks. Can there be any doubt that a drumbeat of stories featuring guns as indispensable instruments for preventing rape, and defending lives, family and treasure, would cause a significant shift in attitudes toward gun ownership?

There are over 20,000 murders per year in the United States. It is becoming more and more common for the media, in the interest of advancing an agenda, to make causes celebre of a select few victims of murder, say a homosexual or a black man. It would be so easy to choose different victims to make a different point and advance an opposing agenda.

The mainstream media are liberally biased, and, like most people with a fundamental problem, they are in denial. Americans are doing an intervention by going elsewhere for their news. Thank Heaven for Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and the Internet.



Comment on JWR contributor Linda Bowles' column by clicking here.

12/04/01: Let the political games begin
11/27/01: Crisis of mediocrity
11/20/01: Good news can be found in the most unexpected of places
11/13/01: Being 'sensitive' at our own risk
11/06/01: Are Hollyweird and academia finally getting the message?
10/30/01: America in need of a totally new immigration policy
10/23/01: Armageddon?
10/16/01: We're learning a lot about ourselves
10/11/01: An ongoing heinous, schizophrenic assault on common sense
10/04/01: Breaking the nation out of a rhetorical cycle
09/25/01: The answer
09/20/01: Can Dubya pull it off?
09/11/01: I never learn!
09/04/01: Helms the racist and other fitting 'tributes'
08/28/01: Do the Dems believe Americans are as dumb as doorknobs?
08/21/01: An open letter to former President William Jefferson Clinton
08/14/01: Prez's stem cell speech was about more than just legal or government-funding issues
08/07/01: Does the government have the authority to forfeit human lives to save fish?
07/31/01: Desperate Dems in search of leadership ---- and respect
07/24/01: About that vaunted 'Wall' that separates
07/17/01: The other half of the wretched school failure story
07/10/01: Congress on a spending spree
07/03/01: Tattered Constitution has finally been torn into pieces
06/26/01: He will not let her "go gentle into that good night"
06/19/01: America's intellectual elite and the media dupes who parrot them
06/12/01: Move over 'big tobacco,' government is now taking on 'big'
06/05/01: This Land is Whose Land? Where's the national outcry over land grabbing?
05/30/01: A simple test that could save your (political) health
05/22/01: Biological pawns liberated from a myth
05/15/01: A nation of dupes?

© 2001, Creators Syndicate