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Description edit
In his nearly thirty years at CBS News, Emmy Award winner Bernard Goldberg earned a reputation as one of the preeminent reporters in the television news business. When he looked at his own industry, however, he saw that the media far too often ignored their primary mission: to provide... read more
Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit
People edit
- Dan Rather: The DAN of the Media Mafia.
- Andrew Heyward: Add a description of this character.
- Larry Doyle
- Ronald Reagan
- Peter Jennings
- Bernard Goldberg
- Bill Clinton
- Jon Klein
- Rush Limbaugh
- Jerry Kelley
- Tom Brokaw
- Steve Forbes
- Eric Engberg
- Harry Smith
- Michael Fumento
- George W. Bush
- Jeff Fager
- Richard Nixon
- Evan Thomas
- J. B. Stoner
- Tony Jackson
- John Johnson
- Bob Schieffer
- Mary Eberstadt
- Gil Garcetti
- Hunter S. Thompson
- George H. W. Bush
- Rob Reiner
- Marian Wright Edelman
- Randy Shilts
- John Leo
Quotes edit
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“Being compassionate in television news these days means never getting your hands dirty.”
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“In the 1970s, Dick Salant, perhaps the most revered president in all of CBS News’s long history, came back to the Broadcast Center from a meeting across town at Black Rock, the CBS corporate headquarters in Manhattan, and told his top staff, ‘I have good news and bad news; what do you want to hear first?’ 'Give us the good news,’ someone said. ‘The good news is that CBS News last quarter <thanks to ‘60 Minutes’> made money for the first time ever.’ ‘What’s the bad news?’ someone else asked. ‘The bad news is that CBS News made money for the first time ever.’ Salant knew. They all knew. If news could actually make money, the suits who ran the network would expect just that. Sure they would want quality, in theory. But they wanted ratings and money, in fact.”
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“Don Hewitt, the creator of ‘60 Minutes,’ loves to tell the story about how, when the show first went on the air, Bill Paley, the founder of CBS, told him, ‘Make us proud!’ ‘Now,’ Hewitt says, ‘they tell us: Make us money!’”
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“The word liberal never passed through Peter’s lips. In fact, Peter felt no need to identify any of the Democratic liberals in the Senate. Not a single one. Only the conservative Republicans. 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’ than there is that he would call a liberal Democrat… a liberal Democrat! On that particular day, Peter identified the conservatives because he thought it mattered. He thought his viewers needed to know. And he was right. He didn’t identify liberals, obviously because he thought it didn’t matter. He was wrong.”
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“‘What would you call the “New York Times” editorial page?’ I asked <Dan Rather>, since he had written op-eds for that paper. 'Middle of the road', he said without missing a beat. ‘You don’t think the “New York Times” has a liberal editorial page?’ I asked him, not believing what I had just heard. ‘No’, he said, ‘middle of the road’. This is a newspaper that consistently editorializes in favor of affirmative action, of all sorts of abortion rights, of strict gun-control laws, and is against the death penalty. The editorials are well written and well reasoned. But they do represent liberal points of view. … You have to back to Dwight Eisenhower to find the last time the "New York Times" came out in favor of anyone even vaguely resembling a conservative. And Dan Rather calls its editorial page ‘middle of the road’.”
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“This is the essence of the problem. To Dan Rather and to a lot of other powerful members of the chattering class, that which is right of center is conservative. That which is left of center is middle of the road. No wonder they can’t recognize their own bias.”
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“I have never heard a single reporter or producer or anchor or executive say anything like: Let’s leave off the liberal label so we can make so-and-so appear high-minded and objective. And while we’re at it, let’s make sure we identify the other side as conservative so our viewers will know he or she is a partisan with a right-wing ideological ax to grind. It never happens that way. Never. Not even with a wink and a nod. If it did, we’d be a lot better off. Because that is fixable. That is blatant bias that cannot and would not be tolerated. What happens in reality is far worse.”
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“The reason we don’t identify <the National Organization for Women> as a liberal group or Laurence Tribe as a liberal professor or Tom Daschle as a liberal Democrat is that, by and large, the media elites don’t see them that way. It may be hard to believe, but liberals in the newsroom, pretty much, see NOW and Tribe and even left-wing Democrats as middle of the road. Not coincidentally, just as they see themselves. When you get right down to it, liberals in the newsroom see liberal views as just plain…reasonable.”
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“I understand that putting white businessmen and rich doctors on TV in a bad light doesn't reflect on all white businessmen and all rich doctors. But putting black looters on TV doesn't reflect on all black people, either. The only people who think it does are either stupid or racist. I don't think we should be making news decisions based on those two groups of losers.”
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“None of this should be seen as an argument against liberal values, or an endorsement of conservative values. This is a big country with a lot of people, and there's room for all sorts of views. This is nothing more than an argument for fairness and balance, something liberals ought to care about as much as conservatives....”
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“'The TV business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs.'”
Hunter S. Thompson -
“If arrogance were a crime, there wouldn't be enough jail cells in the entire United States to hold all the people in TV news.”
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“John Leo and I have talked many times about the nature of bias in the newsroom, about how it is not some sinister plot, but about how mostly liberal journalists tend to frame stories from a mostly liberal point of view. ...Liberals often see America as a dark place populated by all sorts of bigots who can't wait to bash one minority or another. They see America as more antigay than it is, and more racist than it is.”
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“But when <Andrew> Heyward took me back he said no more commentary because 'you might be seen as a conservative balance to an otherwise liberal broadcast...and since the evening news isn't a liberal broadcast, we can't let you do analysis anymore'. There is a technical word to describe this kind of reasoning. The word is 'horseshit'.”
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According to the media elites’ rule-book, when liberals rant it’s called free speech; when conservatives rant it’s called incitement to terrorism.
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That’s one of the biggest problems in big-time journalism: its elites are hopelessly out of touch with everyday Americans.
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The only people who think it does are either stupid or racist. I don’t think we should be making news decisions based on those two groups of losers.
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“One thing to remember about network news is that it steals just about everything from print.
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The Freedom Forum is an independent foundation that examines issues that involve the media.
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So in the end, the liberals who command the highest positions among the media elites are not generous at all. They’re quite selfish, really. They distort images not to ease the pain of oppressed black Americans, but to ease their own pain, to make themselves feel less guilty, and, most important, to prove how good and caring they are.
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What the journalist John Podhoretz said about New Yorkers in general is especially true of the New York media elite in particular: they “can easily go through life never meeting anybody who has a thought different from their own.”
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“The TV business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs.”
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“is that Mr. Rather and the other evening stars think that liberal bias means just one thing: going hard on Republicans and easy on Democrats. But real media bias comes not so much from what party they attack. Liberal bias is the result of how they see the world.”
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In the world of the Jenningses and Brokaws and Rathers, conservatives are out of the mainstream and need to be identified. Liberals, on the other hand, are the mainstream and don’t need to be identified.
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First Sentence edit
I can't say the precise moment it hit me, but I do know that it was on a Sunday night while I was watching the HBO series 'The Sopranos'.
Authors & Contributors edit
- Bernard Goldberg (Author)
First Edition edit
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Publication Date: 2001
ISBN: Add the ISBN.
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Publication Date: 2001
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Classification edit
- Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
- Dewey: 302.23450973
Subjects edit
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