Anger Weakens the Argument   

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

By Bernard Goldberg

Regnery Publishing

232 pages; $27.95

Bias" leaves you dismayed about the direction of TV news all right--but less about whether it slants left or right than whether it is drifting downhill.

Former CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg's chief claim, that there is "liberal bias among the media elites," injects him into an ancient feud, and his arguments are mostly stale and surfacy (although not necessarily wrong). The particulars he cites suggest that shallow and shoddy reporting should worry us more than left-wing tilt.

What drives this book, and makes it a wickedly good read, isn't Goldberg's originality or his evidence. It's his anger.

On one level, he is angry at how CBS colleagues treated him after he complained about what he saw as bias (particularly in a name-naming 1996 column in the Wall Street Journal). Goldberg is so furious at CBS anchor Dan Rather that he compares CBS to the Mafia, "The Dan" to "The Don" and overwrites savagely: "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."

More seriously, Goldberg comes across as a stereotypical angry white male. His fulminations against affirmative action and feminism, while perhaps understandable from his perspective, seem overwrought. For example, he seizes on a harmless joke from "CBS This Morning"--"I'm under the assumption that most men are putzes," host Harry Smith cracks while interviewing a movie star--to anchor an entire chapter feebly branding the media as male bashers.

"Bias," then, hovers somewhere between passion and embitterment. Goldberg's retaliatory fury overwhelms his argument. Like the very TV news tendencies Goldberg is targeting, his own book rides more on zingers and emotionalism than evidence and thoughtful analysis. It grabs attention but fails to persuade.

Still, Goldberg refuels an important debate and scores some points. He offers specific cases of leftward bias, quotes survey evidence of journalists' liberal tendencies and comments insightfully on their progressive worldview. "The bias I'm talking about," he writes, "isn't so much political bias of the Democratic-versus-Republican sort. There is that, for sure, [but] for me that isn't the real problem. The problem comes in the big social and cultural issues, where we often sound more like flacks for liberal causes than objective journalists."

He cites one poll showing that 55 percent of journalists described themselves as liberal, another which found them 50 percent Democrat compared with 4 percent Republican, and a third showing they are "less likely to get married and have children, less likely to do volunteer community service...and less likely to go to church" than others. In Goldberg's view, this "liberal perspective" leaves too many journalists "hopelessly out of touch with everyday Americans."

When it comes to large-magnitude specifics, however, Goldberg's case weakens.

He appropriately criticizes the media, for example, for raising homelessness to the level of national crisis and then practically dropping it from the news. But instead of seriously examining why, Goldberg leaps to the undocumented, and far-fetched, explanation that "homelessness ended the day Bill Clinton was sworn in as president." The media, he argues, delighted in publicizing homelessness to embarrass presidents Reagan and Bush, but backed off to protect Clinton. Without evidence, and given Clinton's generally hostile press, this claim affronts logic.

Goldberg makes similar perceptive criticisms about poor coverage of AIDS, but again he too glibly blames liberal motives rather than exploring in detail why newsgathering can be so inadequate. Over and over, the un-footnoted, overgeneralized "Bias" depends on anecdotes rather than documented patterns.

Worst, it all but ignores a central point--the perpetual tug between the liberalism of rank-and-file journalists (at whatever level it exists) and the steely conservatism of their bosses.

Long before Goldberg's book, people were researching this matter, and to my eye the evidence is convincing: Line reporters and editors lean a little left of center; owners and managers lean a little rightward; and media institutions themselves stand squarely with the Establishment, usually just to the right of center. Goldberg neglects the management side of the equation.

"Bias" also leaves hanging another question: Assuming he is right, why do journalists tend to be liberal?

Maybe it is because most writers are reformers at heart. They want to change the world. By the nature of their jobs, they see a lot of the dark side of life, and they want to fix it. This is a fundamentally liberal approach to life. Journalists also deal every day with news, which is pretty much by definition about change. They become comfortable with change, open to it, and this, too, promotes a fundamentally liberal outlook.

You can make a case that this is good. Journalists tend to see changes coming sooner than most people, to adapt earlier and to help the rest of us make accommodation. There is something liberal to that, but it may be inherent in the newsgatherer's nature.

These days, though, that missionary impulse slams headfirst into the reality of corporatized and consolidated media. In a landscape towered over by AOL Time Warner, Microsoft NBC, Disney ABC and Gannett, liberal leanings of the working stiffs can seem puny. But are they? One of the most fascinating issues in journalism is the interplay between the reformist instincts of journalists and the conformist traditionalism of the companies they work for.

All this is richly debatable and researchable, but Goldberg doesn't get there. "Bias" nicks a few nerves but at the screechy level of "The McLaughlin Group." The chief offense, in the book as well as the news, is superficiality.