2. Conservative Books and "Studies" Alleging "Liberal Bias"

2.3 BOOK: "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News" by Bernard Goldberg

Goldberg's book "Bias" is another in a historically long line of right-wing "opinion" (fiction) books (packaged as "fact"). Not unexpectedly, it is replete with misleading or false statements and just plain nonsense. Needless to say, it failed to prove any "liberal bias" - and the so-called "liberal media" did their job trumpeting the book's fakery as "fact", proving yet again that media is not "liberal". 

This post by Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler may be a good introduction to the book:

It’s amazing that someone would try to show "liberal bias" in the way Bernie Goldberg’s book does. His allegations seem vast and sweeping, but his targets are rather selective. He denounces an eight-year-old study of insect mating; he laments the way Laurence Tribe was introduced on CBS in the 80s (the way he allegedly was introduced; see THE DAILY HOWLER, 1/12/02). But in a book released in December 2001, there is barely a word about the Clinton press coverage, and there isn’t a word—not a single one—about the treatment of Bush’s tax cuts. In fact, there isn’t a single word in this book about the coverage of Election 2000! Can any sane person believe that the press corps was trying to get Al Gore elected? As Goldberg more or less acknowledged in his 12/28 WMAL interview, he himself doesn’t hold that view. So in a book which denounces the corps’ "liberal bias," we simply skip the trashing of Gore. Instead, we mourn the way Laurence Tribe was introduced on CBS during Reagan’s first term.

And this note by Somerby also explains quickly how fact-free and opinion-filled the book is:

GOLDBERG (page 13): “Then what about the mainstream media’s treatment of Clinton? You can’t possibly think they went easy on him, can you?” is what liberals always ask.

It’s a fair question. And the answer is, no, they didn’t go easy on Clinton. The truth is, reporters will go after any politician—liberal or conservative—if the story is big enough and the politician is powerful enough.

Strange, isn’t it? The press corps is swimming in liberal bias—but they “didn’t go easy on Clinton,” this generation’s most important liberal pol! (Bernie doesn’t mention the trashing of Gore.) But then, Bernie can talk his way out of anything. Here’s the way he gets around the media’s coverage of Bush:

GOLDBERG (pages 10-11): Perhaps the charge liberals have been making most often to back their claim of conservative bias is that the media have given George W. Bush a free ride on some very important issues involving foreign policy and national security. For a while you could hardly open up a liberal magazine or go to a liberal Web site without finding some bitter screed about how the press was sucking up to the president on everything from the war in Iraq to supposed civil liberties abuses at home. But the truth is, all the media were doing was what the media always do in times of war: They were rallying round the flag.

Can’t you see? There’s an answer for everything! In BernieVille, the media can “go after Clinton” and give Bush “a free ride,” but they’re still thick with that rank liberal bias! [eRiposte emphasis]

To get a sample of how fraudulent the book is, let's start with David Brock's coverage of this book - a book which was promoted by the right-wing media extensively and which President Bush was photographed with (bold text is my emphasis):

[Some extracts from pages 111-113]
Notably, Goldberg averred, as did the Lichters, that this subconscious bias does not much affect issues of partisan politics. According to Goldberg and other conservative media critics, the media is not biased in favor of Democrats or against Republicans. By and large, conservatives are happy with the coverage of politics. Their anxiety boils down to the "social issues."
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The media elite are charged with favoring civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights. They are "too sensitive" in their portrayal of ethnic minorities, women, and gays on television.
...
Again and again, Goldberg complained that the TV news "dresses up reality" by showing heterosexual women as AIDS victims, rather than "reckless" gay men or drug-addled prostitutes, and by portraying homelessness as a problem of "blond-haired, blue-eyed" all-American families rather than of criminals and the mentally ill. While Goldberg may have been on firmer ground here, he attributed these biases to the fact that the TV news audience is overwhelmingly white and middle-class: They want to see people like themselves when they tune in.⁵⁵ The villain is ratings, not liberal bias, he concluded. He also railed against NBC for treating its parent company, General Electric, with kid gloves. That isn't liberal bias, either.⁵⁶

Once in the book Goldberg attempted a verifiable empirical claim. He argued that conservatives are more often labeled than liberals. "In the world of the Jennings and the Brokaws and the Rathers, conservatives are out of the mainstream and have to be identified. Liberals, on the other hand, are the mainstream and don't have to be identified," he wrote. He did no research to establish the assertion.

Brock cites the work of Stanford researcher Geoffrey Nunberg, who demolished Goldberg's latter claim by actually looking at some numbers. 

Here's some of the relevant data from Nunberg's original Fresh Air piece:

For the most part, Goldberg's book is a farrago of anecdotes, hearsay, and unsupported generalizations. But at one point he strays into territory that can actually be put to a test. That's when he claims that the media "pointedly identify conservative politicians as conservatives," but rarely use the word "liberal" to describe liberals.
...
TV newscasts aren't easy to check, and Goldberg doesn't offer any research to back up his claim. But Goldberg and the other critics of media bias also make their charges about the language of the press, which is available online. So I went to a big online database and did a search on the articles from about 30 major newspapers, including The New York Times , the LA Times, the Washington Post, The Boston Globe , the Miami Herald, and the San Francisco Chronicle .

For purposes of comparison, I took the names of ten well-known politicans, five liberals and five conservatives. On the liberal side were Senators Boxer, Wellstone, Harkin, and Kennedy, and Representative Barney Frank. On the conservative side were Senators Lott and Helms, John Ashcroft, and Representatives Dick Armey and Tom Delay. Then I looked to see how often each of those names occurred within seven words of liberal or conservative , whichever was appropriate. Of course some of those hits involved extraneous noise, say when the word liberal just happens to find itself near Barbara Boxer's name with no real connection between the two. But when I checked a sample of the results by hand, it turned out that more than 85 percent of them did in fact involve the assignment of a political point of view, with phrases like "Paul Wellstone, the liberal senator," or "Senate conservatives like Jesse Helms." And with a sample of more than 100,000 references to the names on the list, the results were statistically sound.

In fact, I did find a big disparity in the way the press labels liberals and conservatives, but not in the direction that Goldberg claims. On the contrary: the average liberal legislator has a thirty percent greater likelyhood of being identified with a partisan label than the average conservative does. The press describes Barney Frank as a liberal two-and-a-half times as frequently as it describes Dick Armey as a conservative. It gives Barbara Boxer a partisan label almost twice as often as it gives one to Trent Lott. And while it isn't surprising that the press applies the label conservative to Jesse Helms more often than to any other Republican in the group, it describes Paul Wellstone as a liberal twenty percent more frequently than that.

At first I wondered whether I had inadvertantly included a bunch of conservative newspapers in my sample. So I did the same search in just three papers that are routinely accused of having a liberal bias, The New York Times , the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times . Interestingly, those papers tend to use labels of both sorts slightly less than the other papers do. But even there, the liberals get partisan labels thirty percent more often than conservatives do, the same proportion as in the press at large.

The tendency isn't limited to politicians, either. For example, Goldberg writes that "it's not unusual to identify certain actors, like Tom Selleck or Bruce Willis, as conservatives. But Barbra Streisand or Rob Reiner. . . are just Barbra Streisand and Rob Reiner." But Goldberg's dead wrong there, too. The press gives partisan labels to Streisand and Reiner almost five times as frequently as it does to Selleck and Willis. For that matter, Warren Beatty gets a partisan label twice as often as Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Norman Lear gets one more frequently than Charlton Heston does.

It's the same with other figures. Goldberg claims that Robert Bork is always called a conservative whereas Laurence Tribe is just identified as a Harvard law professor, but when you look at the data, it turns out that the two are labeled with almost exactly the same frequency. And the columnist Michael Kinsley gets a partisan label slightly more often than George Will does -- and more often than Jerry Falwell.

There are some exceptions here. Americans for Democratic Action gets a label slightly less frequently than the Heritage Foundation, though both are labeled very often. In fact, the ADA gets a label more often than the Young Americans for Freedom does, and almost three times as often as conservative groups like the Cato Institute or the National Association of Scholars. And the overall tendency is overwhelming: liberals are singled out for their views more often than conservatives are.

I found the results surprising, not because I assumed the press had a liberal bias, but because liberal has become such a problemmatic word that nobody seems to want to use it.
...
But nobody every talks about "the C-word," and people on the right are always happy to call themselves conservatives.

I'd have figured that all that would make the press, too, a bit reluctant to use the "liberal" label. But it turns out the newspapers label liberals much more readily than they do conservatives.

[1] Note: After this piece aired, I had a couple of emails from people who suggested that another choice of legislators might have made the results come out differently. That's true, but a look at the accompanying table will show that the tendency to label liberals more than conservatives was no less marked for other figures.

Results of Study

In a follow-up piece in the American Prospect, Nunberg went even farther in response to critics:

One response to the piece came from Bernard Goldberg himself, whose bestseller Bias has given wide circulation to the notion that the press define liberals as the mainstream by labeling conservatives far more than they do liberals. In an op-ed piece in the Miami Herald, Goldberg offers two numbers to prove his point about labeling. First, he says that a six-month search of The New York Times showed that the word "conservative" popped up in news stories 1,580 times; "liberal" only 802 times.

Well, but so what? Goldberg didn't bother to check how many of those instances of "conservative" and "liberal" were used as labels of American politicians or interest groups, much less to relativize those numbers to the occurrences of the names of each. For that matter, he didn't even try to screen out occurrences of "conservative" that referred to European political parties, business suits, or investment strategies, not to mention occurrences of "liberal" that referred to loan repayment terms and helpings of gravy. In short, these figures are utterly meaningless.

Goldberg's other number involves one of those specious comparisons that critics of liberal media bias are prone to. In this case, he points out that "the Los Angeles Times ran only 98 stories about the Concerned Women for America and identified the group as conservative 28 times. But The LA Times ran more than 1,000 stories on the National Organization for Women and labeled NOW liberal only seven times."

But that's meretricious, in every sense of the term. Concerned Women for America is a self-identified conservative Christian group (it opposes, among other things, abortion, homosexual adoption, hate-crime legislation, the AmeriCorps volunteer program, and the teaching of "ill-conceived Darwinian theory" in the schools). Whereas NOW makes a point of rejecting explicitly partisan labels -- the appropriate description of the group is "feminist." To insist on labeling it as "liberal" would be to assume that to be pro-choice makes you by definition a liberal, by which criterion Goldberg ought to be equally indignant that the press doesn't use the "liberal" label for Christine Todd Whitman or Tom Ridge.

Goldberg has made a specialty of loaded comparisons like this one -- in Bias, he complains that the media routinely label Rush Limbaugh as a conservative talk show host, but don't label Rosie O'Donnell as a liberal TV talk show host. I mean, Rosie O'Donnell? A serious critic would have chosen an example better suited to making the point -- comparing Limbaugh to someone like Michael Kinsley or James Carville, say. But it's precisely the blatant speciousness of the Limbaugh-O'Donnell comparison that commends it to people like Goldberg and his devotees, who delight in imagining how annoying it will be to people on the other side. You have the sense Goldberg's not really interested in persuading anyone -- this is for the bleachers.

Brent Bozell's column on my TAP article develops this strategy at length. Bozell claims that I ignored studies by the Media Research Center that show discrepancies in the labeling of what he takes to be conservative and liberal groups. For example, he says, newspaper stories on the Competitive Enterprise Institute included a conservative label 28 percent of the time, compared to less than one percent for the Sierra Club, and that Concerned Women for America is labeled far more often than Planned Parenthood.

But those comparisons are as transparently loaded as Goldberg's are. After all, the Sierra Club membership came close to adopting a resolution favoring immigration restriction a few years ago, and Planned Parenthood proudly points out that Peggy Goldwater was the founder of its Arizona chapter. To insist that the press describe these groups as liberal amounts to demanding that it adopt the lexicon of the right on a wholesale basis, like a baseball manager demanding that the team's own fans should determine the strike zone. Again, this one is for the bleachers.

It's notable that Bozell doesn't mention any figures for well-known groups like the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) or the Center for Justice, who fairly deserve to be labeled as liberal or progressive. As it happens, I did counts for a number of political organizations like these, and if I wanted to play Bozell's game I could point out that ADA and the Center for Justice are labeled far more often than conservative groups like the National Association of Scholars, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, or the Competitive Enterprise Institute. But that would be misleading -- the fact is that there's a lot of unaccountable variation in the frequency of labeling of groups, with some groups on both sides, like the Heritage Foundation and ADA, being labeled far more than others.

Other responses to my study are worthy of more serious discussion. The blogger Edward Boyd went to the trouble of replicating a part of the study on the last six months of the Nexis "Major Papers" database (probably not the best period to pick, since the coverage of American politics has been decidedly atypical in the months following September 11). Boyd used the ten names that I used in my test set, and found that conservatives on average were labeled as "conservative" about fifteen percent more often than liberals were labeled as "liberal."

Not surprisingly, a few conservative bloggers trumpeted Boyd's results as having "refuted" my claims. But even if Boyd's results were valid, that conclusion wouldn't hold. What Goldberg argued, after all, was that there was a massive disproportion in the labeling of conservatives, which is not the same as a fifteen percent difference. Still, Boyd's result surprised me, since the American papers in the Nexis database are largely the same ones I looked at.

But there turns out to be a very big fly in Boyd's ointment. He himself points to the problem when he notes that the database he used contained some English-language foreign papers that might have skewed the results. In fact, fully 32 of the 80 papers in the database are foreign, ranging from the Sydney Telegraph to the Scotsman, the Tokyo Daily Yomuri, and The Jerusalem Post. And when I ran these searches in the Nexis "non-US news" database, which includes all of the foreign papers in the database that Boyd looked at, it turned out that foreign papers label American conservatives more than four times as often as they label liberals -- possibly because of their point of view, but more likely because "liberal" often has another meaning in foreign contexts and because American conservatives like Jesse Helms, John Ashcroft, and Trent Lott are much better known abroad than liberals like Barbara Boxer, Barney Frank, Tom Harkin, or Paul Wellstone.

That disparity introduces a strong tilt in favor of labeling conservatives into the overall data. In fact, when you correct Boyd's results for the relative disproportion of labels in the foreign papers in the database -- a matter of fairly simple math -- you find that the likely rate of labeling in the American papers in the database favors the labeling of liberals by an 18 percent margin. In short, Boyd's data confirm my own, or at least as best as one can make sense of such a small and noisy sample.

One other point worth mentioning is that Boyd did another search that included not just the labels "conservative" and "liberal," but also the labels "right wing" and "left wing," which increased the disparity in the labeling of conservatives to around 30 percent. Conservative media critics have often claimed that the press uses "right wing" a good deal more often than "left wing," and in this they're absolutely right. In my own data, for example, I found that Jesse Helms was described as "right wing" about thirty times as often as Paul Wellstone was described as "left wing." But if you are going to look at "left wing," you're obliged to look at the other labels the press uses for liberal politicians, as well -- terms like "progressive," "on the left," "leftist," and so on. In my own data, it turned out that these labels were applied to Wellstone slightly more frequently than the analogous labels with "right" were applied to Helms. And when I did some searches in the same database that Boyd used, I found that the inclusion of terms like "progressive," "leftist," and "on the left" would have increased Wellstone's rate of labeling by about fifty percent, and doubled Barney Frank's. In for a penny, in for a pound.

I'm inclined to lay the deficiencies in Boyd's study to a lack of sophistication, rather than to the out-and-out disingenuousness of a Goldberg or Bozell. In any event, all these numbers make it clear that labeling simply doesn't come out the way that Goldberg and others say it does. So it isn't surprising that some conservatives have reacted to my survey by depreciating the labeling differences entirely. As Bozell puts it: "Nunberg found liberal politicians were tagged in 4.8 percent of stories to conservatives' 3.6 percent. There's your 30 percent. Big, big deal." And one blogger characterized the results by saying "A staggering 1.2% difference!. . . Come on guys, one percent?"

That's a patently misleading way to interpret these results, of course. (If the murder rate in your city went from 3.6 to 4.8 percent, would you be reassured by a police chief who explained that the increase was only 1.2 percent?) But the very fact that conservatives are pooh-poohing the labeling disparities suggests that they've decided to back off from this argument and move on to looking at other, more subjective forms of close reading.

That's fair enough, but in this connection I was struck by the fact that none of the critics took on the single most extraordinary result in the data I looked at -- this one involving, not labeling, but the way the press talks about the bias story itself. In the newspapers I looked at, the word "media" appears within seven words of "liberal bias" 469 times and within seven words of "conservative bias" just 17 times -- a twenty-seven-fold discrepancy. (As it happens, the disproportion is about the same in the database that Boyd looked at -- 72 to 3).

Now there's a difference that truly deserves to be called staggering. But how should we explain it? Certainly critics on the left haven't been silent about what they take to be conservative bias in the media, whether in the pages of political reviews or in dozens of recent books. But the press has given their charges virtually no attention, while giving huge play to complaints from the right about liberal bias. That's hardly what you'd expect from a press that really did have a decided liberal bias, and in fact the discrepancy is far greater than anything you could explain by supposing that reporters were merely bending over backwards to be fair -- in that case, after all, you'd expect them to give at least a polite nod to the other side, as well.

The media may not have invented the "liberal bias" story, but people like Goldberg and Bozell couldn't have put it over without their active help.

[More on Nunberg's data here.]

Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler has also pointed out how misleading the results could be when research of this kind is done thoughtlessly. 

But this is fairly standard stuff at America’s most ludicrous dotcom. Routinely, Sullivan misreps op-ed pieces to which he provides direct links. Translation: Sullivan is so sure that the cattle can’t read that he’s willing to lie in their unblinking faces. Does anyone at this oddball dotcom ever link—and give up on its host?

But with Sully, the lies are just foreplay. Yesterday, he quickly "defer[red] to a young and fearless blogger," Patrick Ruffini, who had done "a quick statistical analysis of the use of the term ‘right-wing’ in a couple of major papers." Trembling over his acolyte’s brilliance, Sullivan quoted at length:

RUFFINI, AS QUOTED BY SULLIVAN: Since 1996, the Washington Post has used this loaded term ["right-wing"] more than twice as frequently as "left-wing"…This disparity was even more palpable at the New York Times, where 80.2% of the left-right mentions on the national news pages since 1996 have spotlighted the right. The research also found that the more loaded and derogatory the phrase, the more likely it was to be associated with the political right. The term "conservative" outpolled "liberal" by 66-34% in New York Times news page mentions, while the aforementioned "right-wing" clocked in at 80% in a similar measure. However, the term "right-wing extremist" was used at least six times as frequently than "left-wing extremist" (at 87.4% since ’96 in the Times). [emphasis added]

If that didn’t prove it, nothing would. At the New York Times, "right-wing extremist" was used much more often than "left-wing extremist." Case closed.

But duh. Does unequal usage of those terms show a liberal bias? We were dubious, so we did a test—we checked out the use of these terms at the Washington Times. How many times did the Wes Pruden rag use those terms in the last five years? Our finding? The Washington Times reeks of liberal bias! In fact, its liberal bias is even worse than that found in the Times of New York!

That’s right, folks. Over the past five years, NEXIS says that "left-wing extremist" has appeared in the Washington Times all of eight times total. But the term "right-wing extremist" has appeared there 72 times, exactly nine times as often. Surely this fact doesn’t mean that the paper is full of liberal bias. But that’s the conclusion that Sullivan’s method would force us to reach. There’s a word for such a dude. It’s "poseur."

Alas! Ruffini simply counted the use of certain expressions, then leaped to conclusions about liberal bias. There are so many problems with this technique that it would take a whole book to explain them. But no matter. The Brainy Brit quickly bought his method, and soon was broadcasting drek to the planet.

That’s right, gang. If you buy the Brainy Brit’s latest researched technique, the Washington Times is swimming in liberal bias. Count Ruffini will live to research again. But where in the world—where on earth—did we find his hapless promoter?

Next: Motive mavens

The Times, D.C. and Gotham: Ruffini charted the usage of his selected expressions "since 1996." According to NEXIS, if you start your search at 1/1/96, here’s how the Times Two stack up:

The Washington Times:
Right-wing extremist: 86 uses
Left-wing extremist: 9 uses

The New York Times:
Right-wing extremist: 75 uses
Left-wing extremist: 9 uses

According to Sullivan’s brilliant technique, the WashTimes has slightly more liberal bias. Question: Where in the world—where on earth—did we ever come up with this dud? 

That Goldberg was just making up nonsense as he went along is also reflected in this comment captured by Brock [page 113]:

When challenged during his TV appearances, Goldberg invariably replied that since so many Americans believe the claim that the media is liberal, he couldn't be wrong. But as Nunberg pointed out, this logic has a circular quality to it. "In newspaper articles published since 1992, the word 'media' appears within seven words of 'liberal bias' 469 times and within seven words of 'conservative bias' just 17 times," he wrote. "If people are disposed to believe that the media have a liberal bias, it's because that's what the media have been telling them all along."

Eric Alterman in a Nation column said it succinctly:

Sorry, I know enough can be more than enough, but this quote of [Andrew Sullivan] is irresistible: "I ignored Geoffrey Nunberg's piece in The American Prospect in April, debunking the notion of liberal media bias by numbers, because it so flew in the face of what I knew that I figured something had to be wrong." When a conservative pundit "knows" something to be true, don't go hassling him with contrary evidence. It so happens that linguist Geoffrey Nunberg did the necessary heavy lifting to disprove perhaps the one contention in Bernard Goldberg's book Bias the so-called liberal media felt compelled--perhaps out of misplaced generosity--to accept: that the media tend to label conservatives as such more frequently than alleged liberals. Tom Goldstein bought into it in Columbia Journalism Review. So did Jonathan Chait in TNR. Howard Kurtz and Jeff Greenfield let it go unchallenged on Communist News Network. Meanwhile, Goldberg admits to "knowing," Sullivan style, happily ignorant of any relevant data beyond his own biases. He did no research, he says, because he did not want his book "to be written from a social scientist point of view." [eRiposte note: Here's the unbelievable exchange where Goldberg said this.]

In trying to defend his fact-compromised book, Goldberg continued to fabricate things during his media appearances. 

Here's an example from Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler:

But Bernie was all over the TV last weekend discussing this very same topic. In a book event in Washington, D.C. which C-SPAN was clever enough to tape, several spoilsports kept asking Bernie why his book seems to have so few data. First, a political science professor asked why he hadn’t done a systematic analysis of Jennings’ statements. "I didn’t want this to be written from a social scientist point of view," Goldberg said, adding, "I have total confidence that the point here is accurate." But twenty minutes later, he was challenged again, this time by a man named Sandy Grossman, a retired employee of one of the nets:

GROSSMAN: I think the professor brought up a big problem. I mean, you say when they name a liberal they don’t say, "He’s a liberal"…Now I’m thirteen years older than you and I’ve been watching the news longer than you have. And I have heard Teddy Kennedy always, virtually, identified as "the liberal Democratic senator from Massachusetts." So unless you’ve got some kind of numbers, I think it’s very hard for you to make your major thesis…

Goldberg batted it out of the park. Grossman had handed him "an easy one," he said. We include Goldberg’s own emphases:

GOLDBERG: Let me say this. And I want to say this as clearly as I can. You are dead wrong. Dead wrong. Not even close about Teddy Kennedy. You have not, almost every time they mention his name, heard "liberal." I will say this—you have heard the word "liberal" almost never mentioned when they say his name, on the evening newscasts. They just don’t. That part—I mean you gave me an easy one, and I appreciate that. It doesn’t happen.

Except, of course, it does happen. Kennedy isn’t on the evening newscasts that much—they mostly deal with back pain and neuralgia—but we looked at the first six months of 2001, as President Bush entered the White House. During this period, Kennedy was in the news several times. And so, it turned out, was the L-word.

January 23, 2001. Bush has been president all of three days. Senator Kennedy hails the chief. Ands Lisa Myers reports to the nation:

MYERS, NBC Nightly News,1/23/01: Tom [Brokaw], it was an unusual day at the Capitol. Instead of the usual partisan sniping, many Democrats say they are encouraged, even excited by seven—70 to 80 percent of the president’s plan, but are prepared to do battle over the rest. Listen to the Senate’s leading liberal after meeting with Bush.
KENNEDY (on tape): There are some areas of difference, but the overwhelming areas of agreement and the support are very, very powerful.

Myers had called Ted a liberal. But so did her colleague, David Gregory, reporting on February 2:

GREGORY, NBC Nightly News, 2/2/01: Privately, some Democrats wonder who is the real George Bush. The Republican, more conservative than he seems, who nominates the very conservative John Ashcroft, today showing up for work at the Justice Department? Or a true centrist who courts the Congressional Black Caucus this week and leading liberal Ted Kennedy, inviting him and other family members to the White House to watch Thirteen Days, a film based on the Cuban missile crisis?

Gregory hit it right down the fairway—Kennedy was a liberal and Ashcroft was a con. On May 23, Ted was in the news again as James Jeffords left the GOP. And this time, look who was naming the "liberals:"

BROKAW NBC Nightly News, 5/23/01: Tim [Russert], a lot of people may not realize if this all goes as we expect that it will, Monday morning Tom Daschle will be the new Senate majority leader as the leader of the Democratic Party. Not even power sharing with the Republicans.

RUSSERT: Tom, if this happens it is a big deal. Look at the issues. Take judicial appointments, including Supreme Court, no longer overseen by conservative Orrin Hatch. Liberal Democrat Pat Leahy. Education? Ted Kennedy is the new chairman. Environment, oil drilling, nuclear power? Jim Jeffords becomes the new chairman of that particular committee. Missile defense, Carl Levin, liberal from Michigan. All of the Bush agenda will have to be modified significantly in order to pass the Senate.

Russert didn’t explicitly call Teddy a liberal, but Leahy and Levin explicitly were. On June 14, Myers was back, discussing the education bill:

BROKAW, NBC Nightly News, 6/14/01: It wasn’t all bad news for the president today. He was part of a big victory on Capitol Hill, as members of both parties in the Senate voted overwhelmingly to approve a major new education bill. As NBC’s Lisa Myers reports tonight, this was a spectacular case of the old saying about strange bedfellows and politics.

MYERS: Today’s victory for the president came thanks to a most unlikely ally, the liberal lion of the Senate: Ted Kennedy. Why did he do it? Kennedy says he became convinced this Republican president cares about educating poor children.

According to Goldberg, "they just don’t" call Teddy a liberal on the evening newscasts—"it doesn’t happen," he said. At NBC, that is plainly false. But then, ABC had its moments as well:

TERRY MORAN, World News Tonight, 2/1/01: Well, Peter [Jennings], you might call it the courtship of Teddy Kennedy. A little while ago, Senator Kennedy arrived at the White House with his wife Victoria. And he seemed to be carrying some kind of gift for the president, some kind of photo—framed photograph. This marks the fifth time since President Bush’s inauguration that he has met the nation’s leading liberal. It’s a personal and political dance that has official Washington buzzing.

LINDA DOUGLASS, World News Tonight, 6/23/01: If Jeffords switches, Democrat Tom Daschle would be the Senate’s leader. Democrats would control which legislation comes up for a vote. They would chair the committees. Liberal Patrick Leahy, the Judiciary Committee, with power over the selection of Mr. Bush’s judges; liberal Ted Kennedy, the Health and Education Committee, in charge of prescription drug legislation; conservation-minded Jeff Bingaman, the energy—overseeing Mr. Bush's energy plan.

LINDA DOUGLASS, World News Tonight, 6/24/01: But many Democrats were already flexing their new muscle. On the Judiciary Committee, liberals say they will now block judges they deem too conservative.
KENNEDY (on tape): We will not be stampeded. We will not be a rubber stamp for the administration for ideological justices.

Douglas called Teddy a liberal two nights in a row! Why, it even happened at corrupt CBS:

JOHN ROBERTS, CBS Evening News, 1/23/01: Liberal Democrats, eager to show bipartisan support for education reform, gave high marks to most of the plan, but when pressed, said they will fight Mr. Bush’s voucher proposal to help students leave failing schools and take federal money with them.
KENNEDY (on tape): I’m opposed to it. We’ll have chances along the way to oppose it. He understands that.

But that was it for CBS; they only called Teddy a "liberal" one time. Were they hiding Teddy’s liberal ways beneath a burqa of their own making? Actually, they were hiding Teddy altogether. We checked CBS for the month of June, when the other two nets were calling him "liberal." Teddy was mentioned on the Evening News only once, on a night when Bob Schieffer subbed for Dan:

BOB SCHIEFFER, CBS Evening News, 6/15/01: And that’s the news. Sunday on Face the Nation, we’re gonna talk with Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy and the Senate Republican leader, Trent Lott…And Dan Rather will be back on Monday. This is Bob Schieffer in New York.

That was the only time Teddy was mentioned all month. And you’ll notice that Schieffer identified Teddy and Trent in a parallel manner.

Clearly, Goldberg was totally wrong in his statement to Grossman. He implied that network newscasts never call Ted a lib, and that is plainly false. Do they identify Kennedy more or less often than they do with conservative solons? That question we simply can’t answer. We don’t plan to do all Bernie’s research for him—but that is a question he should have studied before he published his laughable book, and before he went all over the country making pleasing but flagrant misstatements.

Indeed, Goldberg’s attitude on this matter is an insult to the American public interest. Here is the question put to him by that nattering professor:

PROFESSOR: When you were thinking about writing this book, did you consider not using anecdotes, but rather having a research assistant to do a systematic analysis of the number of times Rather, Jenning, Brokaw said "conservative" and not "liberal," because I think that one of the criticisms one can lodge at you is that, "Hey, you heard Jennings say it once. How many times has he said it over the course of a year?"…As a social scientist, I think you could have and should have.

We chuckled at the perfesser’s assumption—his assumption that a CBS newsman would have to hire an assistant to gather some actual facts. But Goldberg’s reply simply says it all about Bernie and others just like him:

GOLDBERG: I did think about it. And I didn’t want this book written from a social scientist point of view. I understand the question and it’s a perfectly legitimate question. But I am sure enough, based on things that I’ve seen that social scientists did do—people in this town have done studies that they named conservatives like ten times more than liberals. And I also knew—and please understand how I mean this; this is not some smart-ass thing I’m about to say—I also knew that this would be important to social scientists, but not to regular folks who just want to read about what somebody experienced at CBS News.

Incredible, isn’t it? "Social scientists" might care if Goldberg is right, but "normal people" just want a good story. That is a process we’ve often described. We’ve called it "throwing feed to the cattle."

When he was challenged later by Grossman, Goldberg also referred to the "numerous studies" that nailed own his points so well. He also admitted that he couldn’t quite name them. (Goldberg rarely shows any sign of knowing anything about his own subject.) But why was he sure about his claims? Bernie sketched that out too. "I mean there are certain things that we just know are true because, because it’s just out there," he said. Of course, Bernie also knew-it-was-true that the evening newscasts never call Ted a "liberal." That claim is also "out there," thanks to Bernie. The claim is "out there"—and it’s totally false.

We pointed out, in our earlier HOWLERS, that Goldberg’s book is a laughable mess. To the extent that it discusses real issues at all, it is cut-and-pasted from other sources, some of them highly unreliable; Goldberg clearly did no original research at all in putting this opus together. It presents a list of shaky claims which Goldberg puts forward because they’re "out there." Of Bernie Goldberg’s inexcusable work, therefore, we ask this one question: Where are standards?

Next: How easy is it to yell "liberal bias?" A blast from the past helps you see.

And now for something else totally false: Once Tim had mentioned THE DAILY HOWLER, Bernie knew that he had all the facts. But the schmoes he met at the bookstore event were handed rank disinformation:

GOLDBERG (bookstore event): So why does Peter Jennings—a bright guy, a decent guy, I’m sure he’s a fair guy, you know this wasn’t intentional—why does he think that he has to identify every conservative who walks up as "conservative" and doesn’t have to identify any of the liberals?

As we pointed out in the past, Jennings most definitely did not "identify every conservative" on the day which Goldberg constantly cites. Bernie didn’t peddle that bullroar to Tim. The folks at the bookstore weren’t so lucky.

[More on the "liberal" labeling nonsense, here. A similar labeling-based attack (the operating word? "homophobe" or derivates) is also shown to be bunk, here].

Goldberg also took it a step further comically accusing his critics of personal attacks! To see how ridiculous that is, here's an example from Bob Somerby:

GOLDBERG: Yes, but the proof is in the pudding, as they say, pardon that cliche. If they felt the same way, then they wouldn’t attack on the most vicious, nasty, you know, level that they do.

You could tell that Bernie was shaken. "Most of the reaction has been positive," he told Bill. "Even the negative reaction has been civil. But the personal stuff is real interesting, isn’t it? The personal stuff—Kinsley says it’s a dumb book, as you said."

But then, it was also a very dumb interview. Imagine the cattle, sitting at home, listening to Bernie weep and play victim—then reading the things which he himself said in his own brilliant small tome. The truth is, Bernie hadn’t been such a big Sensitive Guy when he was the one sitting down at the keyboard. On the second page of his book, for example, Bernie says this about CBS, with "Dan," of course, being Dan Rather:

GOLDBERG (page 10): 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.

And no, we didn’t make that up. That was fine for Bernie to write, but when Michael Kinsley called him "dumb," he pretended that he had to see a shrink to figure out how scribes can be so cruel.

Translation: There’s nothing this phony won’t do and say to get the cattle to go buy his droppings. Goldberg’s weeping appearance on Monday night was the latest bit of well-staged herding—an attempt to get the cattle aroused about those perfidious lefties. We just hope the herd recalls Bernie’s angst when they get to this part of his book:

GOLDBERG (page 109): Dan Rather made sure I was kept off the air (or off his evening newscast, anyway), which is death to a television reporter. Peter Johnson, who writes a TV column in USA Today—and who would break his nose on Dan’s behind if the anchorman ever stopped quickly—wrote that many of my colleagues dismissed me as "dead wrong, an ingrate, a nut, or all of the above." [emphasis added]

Do you see a certain recurrent theme in the Great Author’s smutty renderings? Of course, Goldberg’s colleagues were saying the things which Johnson reported, as Goldberg himself recounts in his book. But, just for daring to write the truth, Johnson got smutted by Bernie. All throughout Goldberg’s book, meanwhile, Rather and other CBS execs are compared to figures from organized crime. Various individuals are smutted around in the manner displayed above. The book closes out with an image of Goldberg shooting Rather in the eye (with his remote). But when Kinsley states an obvious fact—this is, in fact, a very dumb book—our poor little victim goes on TV and wonders how people can be so hard. We found ourselves wondering something quite different—how people can be such big phonies.

[Also see this post to see how Tim Russert of MSNBC disgraced himself with fact-free, pandering to Goldberg, returning Goldberg's favor.]

Somerby has another example from the book:

In Chapter 9, Bernie goes on—and on; and on—about the way the mainstream press mistreats men. At one point, he shakes his fist at the New York Times, "the paper that worries about ‘the wounding power of slurs.’" As a guy, Bernie’s very ticked off at the Times. He supplies a wounding example:

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]

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.

Wow! And Bernie had to go back eight years to gimmick up this bogus complaint! This is how the talk-show right laughs in the face of its cattle-fed readers.

Somerby also laments how haplessly incompetent some of the reviews of Goldberg's book (by the mainstream media) were - showing in itself, that there was no "liberal bias" in the media:

With Bernie Goldberg’s lazy book now at the top of the best-seller charts, it’s worth examining the way the tome has been limned by the major press. Alas! When Janet Maslin penned her review in the Times, her somnolence almost matched Bernie’s. What is wrong with our public discourse? Goldberg’s book is a good example. But so, of course, is Maslin’s review. Her nugget statement follows:

MASLIN (pgh 3): Even among those who reject [his central] premise, or some of the ad hominem bitterness on display here, "Bias" should be taken seriously. Unlike Bill O’Reilly, whose best-sellers (like "The No-Spin Zone") trumpet a bullying brand of conservatism as they recycle transcripts of television interviews, Mr. Goldberg has done real homework and has written a real book. Whatever his conclusions, however shaky his suppositions, he asks questions that are worth asking.

Too bad Maslin hasn’t "done real homework!" O’Reilly has only written one best-seller (his latest) which "recycles transcripts of television interviews," and if Maslin thinks Goldberg has "done real homework," maybe she’s been out of grade school too long. Does Goldberg "ask questions that are worth asking?" That, of course, is easily done. But has Goldberg actually done any homework? Reading Maslin, one suspects that pampered Times scribes may no longer grasp the key concept:

MASLIN (4): "Whenever you hear an anchorman or reporter use the word ‘controversial,’ it is usually a signal that the idea that follows is one the media elites do not agree with," he maintains. And whenever you hear the word "conservative" on one end of the political spectrum, he adds, you won’t often hear "liberal" on the other. That, he says, is because network heavyweights regard their own opinions as middle-of-the-road and simply assume that the wider world agrees with them. (He twice quotes Pauline Kael’s astonished reaction to the fact that Richard Nixon had been elected president. "I don’t know a single person who voted for him!" she exclaimed, despite the fact that Nixon won in 49 states. She did live in the 50th state, Massachusetts.)

After noting that Goldberg has "done real homework," Maslin immediately cites an area where Goldberg did almost no work at all. His claims about ideological identifications may be true, but he makes absolutely no effort to support them (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 1/14/02). But then, would Maslin know evidence if it bit her? She seems to think that the views of Kael—a movie critic—are relevant to Goldberg’s claims about bias in political coverage. This takes "anecdotal evidence" to a whole new realm; in this case, even the single anecdote cited is irrelevant to the topic at hand.

A few paragraphs later, Maslin displays her puzzling concept of evidence once again. She limns Goldberg’s efforts on race:

MASLIN (7): [W]hen it comes to race-related issues, Mr. Goldberg also presents his strongest evidence. He claims that a CBS producer was chided ("We have to be more careful next time") for filming too many black prisoners on an Alabama chain gang, even though only one prisoner happened to be white. If the program was truly sensitive to race, he asks, why not investigate whether the black convicts had been unfairly arrested, instead of worrying about putting them on the air? And why, he wonders, are there demonstrably fewer black interviewees on newsmagazine shows during the all-important periods that determine advertising rates? "South Africa in the bad old days was more integrated than ‘Dateline’ during sweeps!" he says.

In the latter part of this passage, Maslin falls for one of the most ludicrous parts of Goldberg’s book—the section where he comically claims that TV magazine shows are guilty of "liberal bias" when they strive to keep minorities off the air! Maslin fails to see that Goldberg’s claim argues against his broader thesis. But she also fails to note the groaning problem with the "evidence" presented to back Goldberg’s assertion. Maslin highlights Goldberg’s claim that magazine shows use fewer blacks during "sweeps" month—the "all-important periods that determine advertising rates." Alas! Goldberg cites absurdly limited data in this area; in keeping with the total sloth on display in his book, he only examines one sweeps month, May of 2000. (By total coincidence, Brill’s Content had already examined this month; Goldberg simply uses their data.) And what did those limited data show? Goldberg mentions only four magazine programs, but concerning one, Sixty Minutes, he notes some interesting facts. During sweeps month, the show featured seven black main characters in its twelve stories. Two months later, in Goldberg’s non-sweeps "control" month, the show featured two black characters, in fifteen stories. In short, Sixty Minutes used far more minorities during sweeps month; the other three programs used marginally fewer. But Goldberg made his sweeping claim about sweeps month despite these contradictory data, and Maslin, laughably, praises him for it. Indeed, in keeping with the general tone of Bias, Goldberg presents the data from Sixty Minutes without so much as stopping to note that the data flatly refute his thesis. But then, why shouldn’t he go ahead and lodge a claim which is contradicted by his facts? Even a critic from our greatest paper is too lazy and inept to notice the problem. Indeed, Maslin thinks that this burlesque is an example of the book’s "strongest evidence."

One further note about Maslin and race, this time concerning those prisoners. Goldberg describes a CBS producer who was concerned with footage from a prison work gang, but the problem is not as Maslin describes it. Goldberg quotes the producer saying, "Well, we have to be more careful next time. We don’t want to give the impression that the only prisoners down there are black." We would have thought that only a 90s-era Angry White Male could fail to see the good judgment in that; assuming that Alabama has white convicts too, it would surely be better to avoid showing chain gangs where the dudes are all black. (This is, of course, especially true because of the very history of race-on-TV which Goldberg assails in this book.) But Maslin joins Goldberg in his incomprehension of the producer’s concern. She even misstates the nature of the problem; the problem was the fact that the chain gang was almost all black (and the prison system probably wasn’t), not the fact that the cameraman filmed the prisoners who were actually there.

Goldberg’s book is a total joke—a lazy insult to the American public discourse. But then, when we see the areas where the New York Times thinks Goldberg presented his "strongest evidence," we see that the Goldberg’s obtuseness and sloth may have entered the bloodstream elsewhere. Indeed, Maslin closes out in grand fashion, failing to notice the greatest absurdity in a book that spills over with same:

MASLIN (9): In the end, the observations in "Bias" about the economics of television are as disturbing as what he has to say about women in the work force…the homeless…or religion… The most important bias to contemplate here is the one against serious, unglamorous news. "Edward R. Murrow’s ‘Harvest of Shame,’ the great CBS News documentary about poor migrant families traveling America trying to survive by picking fruits and vegetables, would never be done today," he says. "Too many poor people. Not our audience. We want the people who buy cars and computers." [END OF REVIEW]

As we noted last week, the claim that Harvest of Shame wouldn’t be aired today is an argument against the central claim of Bias—the claim that liberal bias is ruling the media. But Goldberg didn’t seem to notice, and Maslin didn’t notice either. Maybe it isn’t "liberal bias" which we should fear most from the Times.

A lot more here and here. FAIR has some comments here.