J___ directed me to Bernard Goldberg's book Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News. Needless to say, Bias offered none of the above. I picked it up for $.99 on Amazon, which after reading it was about $.99 too much. The book was many things, but it definitely was not a study of liberal bias; unless liberal bias means self serving profit seeking.
Much of the book is polemic against Rather and CBS News. Goldberg published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that provoked CBS to effectively demote him for breach of contact. Afterward, Dan "the Don" Rather no longer spoke to him. That ugly little episode is the starting gun for Bias.
Goldberg never makes a case for liberal media bias beyond a blurb on the cover that says, "His case is air tight." The book opens with an explanation of what inspired Goldberg to publish his critical op-ed, an Eric Enberg piece on then presidential candidate Steve Forbes' flat tax. Enberg unfairly criticized and belittled Forbes' proposal, which in turn disgusted Goldberg at the unfair treatment of Forbes. For the sake of argument, let's concede that the show made a priori judgments of Forbes tax "scheme." Goldberg does not mention that Newt Gingrich also criticized the "scheme" and never gets around to explaining why the treatment of Forbes' plan - while unfair - was liberal bias and if so, why Newt Gingrich was in on the liberal high jinks. An interesting aside, when I asked J___ about the Gingrich criticism he claimed Goldberg disclosed this fact in the book. I searched through it twice and found no mention of it.
Throughout much of the book, Goldberg undermines his thesis. (He distorts news counts and quotes as documented elsewhere.) For example, Goldberg does recount personal testimony of a corporate owned media protecting their interests. Here is Tom Brokaw:
GOLDBERG (page 40):Brokaw and NBC were unwilling to cover a story about their corporate owners that would hurt their stock; this is not liberal bias. It is a corporation worried about its profit margin. This is an important theme that Goldberg returns to several times.
I wondered what Brokaw would do if he found out that General Electric, the company that owns NBC and signs his paychecks, was ripping off consumers by making shoddy light bulbs in order to rake in a few extra bucks... On January 2, 2001... the Wall Street Journal ran a lead story on page one reporting that federal safety officials were looking into problems with a certain GE airplane engine. They were worried that parts of the engines might disintegrate and someday cause a major air disaster.
After the story broke, GE confirmed that the WSJ got it substantially right... Nonetheless GE stock dropped nearly 9 percent in one day because of the news... So how did Tom Brokaw play it on his nightly newscast? He didn't. He decided not to 'attack' his own organization.
Goldberg spends a lot of print railing against the news coverage of the homeless. He depicts a media that is cynical, devoid of compassion, misleading, and largely driven by a desire for ratings - but certainly not liberal. When interviewing homeless people newsmen sought out white homeless people instead of blacks. GOLDBERG (page 71): "In a word, we put them on TV for the reason television people do almost anything - ratings." Goldberg goes on to describe how television newsmen distort reality: (emphasis mine)
"White was better than black. Clean was better than dirty. Attractive better than unattractive. Sane was better than insane. And sober was better than addicted. So when TV people went looking for that right kind of homeless face to put on their news programs, they went to people like Robert Hayes, who ran the National Coalition for the Homeless in New York.Goldberg presents a powerful case that the news people attempt to shape the perceptions of reality to make it more palatable for the American people to increase, as Goldberg puts it, "in a word... ratings." Goldberg concludes his analysis by suggesting that the "prettifying" is an attempt to garner sympathy from American people for the plight of the homeless. This is an odd analysis that says more about Goldberg's perception of what liberalism is and nothing about liberal bias.
In 1989, Hayes told the New York Times that when congressional committees and TV news producers contact him, 'they always want white, middle-class people to interview.'
The problems that homeless people face are quite real and ugly. Scrubbing the rough edges away does nothing to help address their primary concerns; mental illness and addiction. A progressive agenda for helping the homeless would focus on addressing those problems and prescribing solutions to them. It is a cynical ratings tactic to misrepresent their problems so that Americans won't change the channel. It is certainly not "liberal" to "prettify" the homeless to boost ratings.
Goldberg explains why they "prettified" the subjects of their news coverage. Once again, it has nothing whatever to do with liberal bias and agendas. Goldberg on page 162: "I spoke to many producers who, with only slight variations, told the same story: White characters appeal more to viewers than black characters. More viewers mean higher ratings. So we pick white characters whenever we can!" Again, the whitewash had nothing to do with helping the homeless out in a liberal crusade. It was for “higher ratings.”
A bit later he presents another anecdotal story: "Another 48 Hours producer told me about a Hispanic man with a slight accent who was edited out of the story before it aired." Goldberg asked why the man was edited since he was "coherent." The producer replied, "Because they don't think our audience cares about Hispanics." Later someone explained to him why white stories move faster through the news than minority driven stories. "These shows make a tremendous amount of money. There's no profit in people of color." What this has to do with liberal/progressive agendas is left unexplained. Money and ratings are the overriding concerns time after time; oddly Goldberg concludes that this is evidence of liberal bias.
Goldberg moves from the coverage of minorities on the streets to the coverage of minorities in prison. He complains about the media's coverage of chain gangs in Alabama. One of his colleagues came under fire for not getting enough white inmates in the footage of inmates. The problem was that most of the inmates were black, but his editors did not want to convey the idea that all the men on the gang were black. They wanted more whites for their white audience and feared charges of racism.
Goldberg outlines what would be traditional liberal concerns with a list of hypothetical questions. If the media were liberally biased then it follows that these lines of inquiries would shape their coverage.
GOLDBERG (page 107):Goldberg continues to undermine his thesis.
"What if journalistic sensitivity had led Berman and the other CBS Evening News senior producers down a different road?
'Are the Alabama authorities unfairly rounding up black men?' they could have asked.
'Are they convicting black mean of crimes that white men don't get convicted of, maybe don't even get arrested for?' they could have asked.
'Are the authorities labeling black convicts 'troublemakers' in order to funnel them onto the chain gang - simply because they are black? Is that why the ratio on the chain gang was about nineteen to one?'
If any of the answers had been 'yes', it would have made a great story. But to get to the facts for a story like that would be hard, time-consuming, expensive work."
GOLDBERG (continueing)"Image is what the TV producers in New York were concerned with. Let's not make it look like it really is. That might cause problems... If those black men in Alabama were actually being railroaded simply because of their race, let someone else, with more time and money, worry about that."Yes, someone with a liberal agenda. The coverage was again driven by ratings. They did not care at all about the liberal agenda Goldberg outlines.
Compare Goldberg's characterization of the market driven news, sacrificing content for ratings, with Ralph Nader's liberal outcry of criminal injustice from Fight the Good Fight.
NADER (page 47):Goldberg documents the pervasive desire to whitewash coverage of prisoners since white people want to watch other white people in the news. Liberal movements are driven by a desire to right injustices and change the status quo. Liberal struggles traditionally challenge existing perceptions and upset people; abolition, civil rights, anti-war, pro choice, pro labor, social subsidies, etc. Goldberg's "liberal" media distorted their coverage so as not to appear racist and drive ratings. They did not want to "cause trouble" which would interfere with profit margins.
The criminal justice system is also broken - so badly that one hardly knows where to begin describing the breakdown. We can start with the war on drug, since commentators across the political spectrum recognize its lunacy...
The war on drugs also contributes to other negative features of the criminal justice system, including discriminatory treatment of African Americans. Racial profiling results in harassment and invasion of privacy of people who have done nothing to justify suspicion - people whose only crime is the color of their skin.
Nader continues (directly): "Proponents of racial profiling claim it is justified on the ground that African Americans commit a disproportionate and amount of crime... that is in large part because of the war on drugs.Crack is a black drug, and powder is predominantly white. Nader discusses several injustices to explain the disparities, but the point is made: a liberal agenda would focus on why there were more blacks than whites in prison. Misrepresenting the proportion of whites to blacks may, as Goldberg lamely claims, make the issues palatable for white people (and increase ratings), but undermine a liberal agenda by obfuscating the truth.
Between 1980 and 1999, the incarceration rate for African Americans more than tripled. According to Urban Institute, black men today have a 28 percent lifetime chance of incarceration, compared to 7 percent for white men. This was largely the result of tougher sentencing laws enacted in the 1980s that made punishment for distributing crack cocaine 100 times greater than the punishment for powder cocaine."
The story that emerges from Bias is of a media concerned only with profits and ratings. Goldberg's "liberal" media exploits inmates, the homeless, and minorities for ratings. The "liberal" media could not care less about whether prisoners were mistreated or received unequal justice, those were problems for "someone else, with more time and money, [to] worry about."
Goldberg discusses news journalists and race issues.
GOLDBERG (page 113): The business of playing with the images and being ultra sensitive to what we label people is not about actually doing good. If doing good were what it was about, we'd spend lots of money investigating why so many blacks wind up on the chain gang. That might really accomplish something... This compassion wasn't for the downtrodden at all. It was for us. All this concern wasn't about injustices. It was about feeling better about ourselves - and making as little personal sacrifice as possible.As Goldberg points out, the motivations were self serving and money-driven. They were not interested in furthering a liberal agenda. His thesis makes sense if liberalism is about "making as little personal sacrifice as possible" to feel "better about ourselves," but he never defined it as such. The reader is left with the conventional definition and Goldberg’s bizarre conclusion.
Goldberg never presents a statistical or systematic examination of news coverage. The only statistics he presents start on page 132. His statistics are on the difference of opinion between the public and journalists with respect to their party affiliations. One of his studies was a 1985 survey by the Los Angeles Times. The book was published in the year 2002. A critical mind could conclude that Goldberg's unwillingness to find more updated polls and studies are evidence of laziness.
What Goldberg does not consider is that journalists are trained to separate their personal beliefs from their reporting. They are taught to objectively present all sides of an argument. Furthermore, reporters are assigned to specific topics for coverage by their editors or producers. The editors and producers have their own set of concerns. As Goldberg points out, "in a word" it is about "ratings." The editors and producers of news media answer to stockholders. If they consistently publish stories which are detrimental to their stock then they are canned. Their stock is driven by advertising revenue; advertising is driven by ratings. It is hard not to miss the obvious conclusions but Goldberg does a fine job. Goldberg documents how these pressures work to shape news coverage far more so than any journalist's personal biases, which incidentally he leaves unattended.
Epilogue:
One of Goldberg's distorted quotes was about Ronald Reagan and a Times columnist. Thanks to the liberal Daily Howler for investigating. Here is what Goldberg said:
GOLDBERG (page 66): A lot of people—and not just conservatives—think [the Times] hit rock bottom in 2001, when Howell Raines took over as executive editor… Raines was famously quoted as saying that “the Reagan years oppressed me.” He has also declared that Reagan, a man beloved by millions of his countrymen, “couldn’t tie his shoelaces if his life depended on it.”
In contrast, there was his view of Bill Clinton: “Huge political talent,” declared Raines when Charlie Rose asked how he thought history would regard Clinton.
The Howler did some research and actually read the source of the quote. It came from a book on fly fishing, here it is:
RAINES (pages 83-84): Even here in northern Maryland, we were still below the Mason-Dixon line and technically still in the South. More to the point, we were in hillbilly territory. In the nineteenth century, these people tended whiskey stills…Now their descendants still lived back in the hollows of the Catoctins, experienced poachers of deer and turkey and of the fat trout in the fly-fishing-only section of Hunting Creek. In short, Dick Blalock had brought me to one of the northernmost outposts of the Redneck Way.
“See that pool?” said Dick. “That was Jimmy Carter’s favorite pool when he was President. We’re only about a mile from Camp David. The Fish and Wildlife boys kept the stream lousy with big brood fish from the hatcheries when he was up here. I knew a guy who used to slip in and give every big trout in the stream a sore lip whenever he heard Carter was coming. Of course, I liked Carter. Charlie Fox and Ben Schley taught him a lot about fishing, and he ties a good fly. Reagan couldn’t tie his shoelaces if his life depended on it.
Raines did not even make the "shocking" statement; it was Raines quoting someone else! Furthermore it was about fly-fishing and not derogatory towards Reagan’s mental capacity. The Howler offers an excuse for Goldberg; the quote came from Ultra Conservative Reed Irvine's Media Research Center organization. Goldberg used the quote as he found it and may not have bothered to check the original text. This is obviously extremely lazy, but they also found another example which is less forgiving to Goldberg.
Goldberg railed against the feminism of the NYT. Here is what he said (thanks again to the Howler)
GOLDBERG (page 134): Take a story by Times reporter Natalie Angier that begins this way: "Women may not find this surprising, but one of the most persistent and frustrating problems in evolutionary biology is the male. Specifically…why doesn’t he just go away?" [Goldberg’s ellipsis]
The Howler comments:
To Bernie, those are notes from Big Slur. So we checked Angier’s piece, and what did we find? We found an 1800-word article in the "Science Desk" section, written back in 1994, which explored the biological reasons for sexual reproduction among the lesser orders. "Scientists say they still cannot explain to their satisfaction why the great majority of species on earth reproduce sexually," Angier wrote—and she explored the reasons for such reproduction among snails, and snakes, and insects. The article had absolutely nothing to do with males and females of our tribe ("men" and "women"). Indeed, here’s a part of the wicked horse-whipping we "males" were receiving this day:
ANGIER: But evolutionary biologists point out that most mutations are potential trouble, and the entire system of copying chromosomes from one generation to the next has evolved to prevent accidental alterations to the genetic text, not to court them. Thus, Dr. Redfield’s new calculations underscoring the mutational guilt of the male put a heavier burden than ever on theorists seeking to explain the purpose of sex.
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