Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News
Sarah Rodriguez Let's get right to the point. Bernard Goldberg's "Bias" could have been -- no, <I>should</I> have been -- a valuable critique of the way television news presents information to the American public. Instead, it's a waste of an important opportunity to provide a real public service.
Let’s get right to the point. Bernard Goldberg’s “Bias” could have been — no, should have been — a valuable critique of the way television news presents information to the American public. Instead, it’s a waste of an important opportunity to provide a real public service.
As an insider, Goldberg knows how the system works: how and why stories are assigned; how they are edited to buttress editorial points by including particular images; how stories are “cast,” that is, who is interviewed for opinions and expertise. Goldberg reasons that those are just some of the subtle ways a liberal slant creeps into network evening news programs, primetime magazine broadcasts and even the special reports covering breaking news.
Sometimes the former CBS News correspondent provides specific examples and asks questions that thoughtful broadcast journalists would likely concede are worthwhile considering. He gets it right, for example, when he chronicles the use of race as a criterion for who gets included in TV newsmagazines and who gets excluded. Goldberg concludes correctly, I believe, that the concern for ratings (and profits) has invaded the news business and in the past decade, the bottom line has trumped the editorial line more and more. The senior staffs of those programs have made it clear in a number of ways that they believe that white viewers will turn off black and Hispanic protagonists and that means ratings will suffer. (Goldberg’s inside knowledge confirms what I found in the course of interviewing men and women at networks and local stations for my “Handbook of Best Practices for Television Journalists,” underwritten by the Freedom Forum.) What is not clear is how this concern for the bottom line demonstrates a liberal bias. Conservatives like to make profits too.
Goldberg argues that television reporting of homelessness and of heterosexual AIDS is overblown and that the networks ignore negative effects of daycare for children. The reason? The “elites of big time journalism” are liberal and they view conservatives as “morally deficient” on the big social issues. Some of Goldberg’s reasoning requires a real stretch to connect the dots between what he discerns as a liberal slant and which, he concludes, is effecting public attitudes. Take for example, Goldberg’s work on a child support story. He discovered that then L.A. District Attorney, Gil Garcetti was relentlessly pursuing one individual as a dead-beat dad even though the man in question could prove through DNA paternity tests that he was not the father of the child in question. According to Goldberg’s analysis, the liberal pro-feminist bias of television news created conditions that made Garcetti’s misguided zeal possible. “This was an injustice that could only happen in a culture where men are seen … with too much power, especially over women.” With all due respect, it’s difficult to accept that Gil Garcetti found his mission in life because of the content of CBS News broadcasts.
I have less of a problem with some of Goldberg’s observations than with his tone. In one instance, Goldberg points out how Peter Jennings, covering the Senate’s opening phases of the Clinton impeachment trial in 1999, always characterized conservative Republican senators as conservative but never called liberal Democrats liberal, identifying them only by their name and state. Goldberg says that is because “in the world of the Jennings and Brokaws and Rathers, conservatives are out of the mainstream and need to be identified. Liberals are the mainstream and need not be identified.” But, instead of continuing on with a thoughtful, fair and balanced approach that just might convince Peter Jennings to be more inclusive when handling similar situations in the future, Goldberg feels obligated to add: “There’s a better chance that Peter Jennings, the cool, sophisticated Canadian, would identify Mother Teresa as ‘the old broad who used to work in India’ that there is that he would call a liberal Democrat … a liberal Democrat!” Cute. But what does it accomplish in improving the state of the TV news business other than making Goldberg feel better?
Goldberg started down his path to angry isolation in an op-ed contribution to the Wall Street Journal. He took issue with a report by then-colleague Eric Engberg about Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes’ plan for a flat tax. Engberg was more than skeptical about the Forbes plan and he used a riff on David Letterman’s Top 10 list to deride it. Annoyed by the piece, Goldberg asked a number of people in the CBS News editorial chain of command why they had permitted Engberg to adopt such a scornful tone in what was supposed to be an analysis entitled “Reality Check.” He says that no one who had reviewed the piece had seen anything wrong with Engberg’s content or approach. He attributes that indifference to a liberal bias at CBS News which “comes in the big social and cultural issues where we often sound more like flacks for liberal causes than objective journalists.”
Targets of Goldberg’s examination are frequently introduced, or surrounded by sarcasm, holier-than-thou animus and what seems to be a relentless effort to demonize rather than improve the efforts of his former colleagues. He gets personal about Dan Rather (who cares if Rather wears expensive Saville Row suits?) and CBS News President Andrew Heyward. His attitude gets in the way of any hope that his readers will find solutions in the text.
One of the icons of CBS News, Fred Friendly, used to walk the halls saying, “Everybody needs a good editor.” Maybe Eric Engberg would have gained something from an editor’s sharp review to tone down his Reality Check piece. By the same token, it seems to me that Goldberg would have would have benefited from editorial oversight as well.
(Six-time Emmy winner Av Westin spent 20 years at CBS News as a reporter, editor, producer and director. In addition to stints at PBS, Time Warner and King World, he worked for 21 years at ABC News.)
