BIAS: A CBS INSIDER EXPOSES HOW THE MEDIA DISTORT THE NEWS
by Bernard Goldberg
Perennial, 238 pp.
WHAT LIBERAL MEDIA? THE TRUTH ABOUT BIAS AND THE NEWS
by Eric Alterman
Basic Books, 322 pp.
The media performs two basic functions in a democratic society. First, it reports the news. Second, it asks questions. Both activities, inevitably, reflect the conscious or unconscious bias of those in the media who undertake them.
Even the simple task of reporting a story is influenced by subjective considerations. Who decides what is newsworthy in the first place? How much of the story is actually told? How does the choice of specific words and phrases shape the telling of the story? Publishers, editors and journalists make these decisions in collusion, and sometimes conflict, bringing us an inherently biased view of the world.
That much seems obvious and is probably unavoidable. A greater concern is the question of political bias in the media. Do certain newspapers, TV programs, etc. pursue a specific agenda, skewing their coverage of events in favour of one political party over another? Are certain topics – e.g. abortion, public welfare, tax cuts – reported in a manner that reflects the personal or political beliefs of the reporter, editor or publisher in question? Do some subjects simply never get covered as a result of political bias?
Such questions rarely receive extensive consideration in Canada. Here, debate about the media usually centres on the concentration of ownership or the dominance of the Ottawa-Toronto axis. The former issue has abated in recent years with the departure of Conrad Black; the latter continues to simmer, but rarely comes to the boil. The most prominent media outlet accused of political bias over the years has been the CBC, which has come under close scrutiny and attack for its real or imagined left-wing leanings ever since its creation in 1936.
The situation is different in the United States, where suspicions of a biased media feed into a political culture already prone towards conspiracy theories. Thus Nixon’s disgrace and downfall can, in part at least, be blamed on a liberal media, while Clinton’s similar fate 25 years later was the result of a conservative media witch-hunt.
At least, that’s the way it’s been told by various commentators over the years, and two books have recently joined the debate: Bernard Goldberg’s Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, which is now out in paperback, and Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News. They offer starkly different views of bias in the media today, but they also inadvertently underline the appallingly low level of political discourse in the wake of 9/11.
Goldberg was a correspondent with CBS News from 1972 to 2000. In February 1996, he made the "mistake" of writing an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal that railed against what he saw as the pro-liberal, anti-Republican slant of the media. Overnight, Goldberg found himself to be persona non grata among his colleagues to such an extent that his career eventually ground to a halt.
Originally published last year, Bias is his response and revenge. Purporting to be an exposé of the liberal media, it is in fact a vicious and vindictive attack on those individuals he blames for his ousting. A full third of the book, for example, consists of a sustained assault on news anchor Dan Rather. "It’s not easy telling you that Dan Rather… really is two different people; while one Dan is funny and generous, the other is ruthless and unforgiving," Goldberg states. "I would have preferred to write about strangers." Yet he overcomes this unease and for page after page launches into his ex-colleague.
The result is that Bias loses its focus. But things are worse, much worse than that. It is extremely badly written, overburdened with italicized phrases, exclamation points and sophomoric profanity – all of which serve to blunt any point Goldberg may have been trying to make. It is also singularly lacks any hard evidence, preferring instead to argue by anecdote and assertion. Its characterization of homeless people ("winos or drug addicts or schizophrenics… drool coming out of the side of their mouths") is simply offensive, as is Goldberg’s "discussion" of AIDS victims, working mothers and pretty much every other subject he tackles.
In terms of tone, style and substance, this is probably the worst book I’ve ever read. I finished it feeling dirty, intellectually insulted and massively unconvinced. Goldberg’s claim that" Even President Bush thought Bias was worth thinking about" probably says something about someone – I’ll leave you to decide just what.
On first appearances, Eric Alterman’s book, What Liberal Media?, is far more promising. A well crafted, heavily documented and smoothly phrased piece of work, it confronts the accusation of liberal bias in the media head on and argues instead that "the entire news industry is organized to communicate conservative views and push our politics to the right – regardless of how ‘liberal’ any given reporter might be."
The first hundred pages reasonably support this argument. Alterman’s discussion of what he calls "the punditocracy" on TV, radio and in print is especially sharp and convincing. "This group of commentators," he writes, "who, together with the White House, define the shape and scope of public debate in the elite media is dominated by two qualities: ignorant belligerence and sitcom-like silliness." But unlike Goldberg, Alterman goes beyond such cheap shots to develop a strong critique of conservative bias among newsmakers.
About halfway in, however, the book makes a sudden shift when it turns to the media’s specific handling of the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Alterman’s argument weakens when he starts to hide behind semantics (distinguishing too sharply, say, between "liberal" and "Democrat") and special pleading (e.g. his dismissal of the unquestionable pro-Democrat voter preference among journalists). Still, his thesis emerges sound and intact at the end, which is much more than can be said for Bias.
Yet I’m left with the distinct feeling of "so what?" The distance between Democrat and Republican – as between Conservative and Liberal in Canada – has shrunk to so little, in any measurable sense, that it hardly matters who wins. This convergence thus largely renders moot any bias – left or right – that may exist in the media.
And that leads to the real problem. Both Goldberg and Alterman are so focused on the insular, narcissistic relationship between the media and mainstream politics that they each neglect a much greater issue: why is it that the actual range of debate, disagreement and even bias itself is so small that it has no meaning to the vast majority of voters? That neither book addresses this question simply underlines the sorry state of political culture in America today.
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