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

2.4 BOOK: "Arrogance: Rescuing America From the Media Elite" by Bernard Goldberg

In Sec. 2.3, Goldberg's book "Bias" was covered. Let's now look at Goldberg's other book "Arrogance: Rescuing America From the Media Elite".

As it turns out, after writing one fraudulent, fact-compromised book, Goldberg decided to write up another. Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler examined this one too (numerous links on Somerby's coverage of both books are available here and here). Let me pick and highlight one or two of them (for lack of space/time).

One:

Bernie just loves cut-and-pasting. In Bias, he cut-and-pasted from the MRC—and ended up slandering Natalie Angier for her thoughts about insect reproduction. In Arrogance, he cut-and-pasted from the same lousy source, this time slandering Howell Raines, for something a fishing guide said. And just for the record, when he cut-and-pasted from Michael Kelly, he fell into factual error again. Did Time’s Jack White “hop on board the bandwagon” after Gore’s comments about the media? That’s what Bernie clearly said, but once again, the scribe was all wet. White’s statement was made on November 15, 2002, on C-SPAN—several weeks before Gore’s comments. The error is trivial, but the method is not. Goldberg’s books are endlessly cut-and-pasted—and endlessly, Bernie makes no attempt to check out the work he has borrowed.

Two:

Who is the corps’ biggest Hillary suck-up? In Arrogance, Goldberg devotes a chapter to the topic, and he makes an odd choice: Margaret Carlson. Here is the passage where he makes his award. By the way, note the rancid tone Goldberg brings to his book—a book in which he weeps and moans about the lack of polite discourse by liberals:

GOLDBERG (page 148): Still, Nina Burleigh, Carole Simpson and even my ex-colleague Leslie Stahl all take a backseat when it comes to painting Hillary’s toenails. They are all runners-up in the “How May I Serve You, My Queen?” Sweepstakes. Because none of them—not even Newsweek contributing editor Eleanor “Rodham” Clift—can rival Margaret Carlson, who does commentary for TIME magazine (and is a regular on CNN’s Capital Gang) for sheer devotion to Ms. Hillary. If they gave out Nobel Prizes for Hillary-gushing, Margaret Carlson would be on her way to Stockholm.

Like many other Angry Male Pundits, Bernie Goldberg has a hard time being polite to liberal or mainstream female journalists. The name-calling is quite frequent, as are the lightly sexist remarks. But then, feminists are truly the source of all evil. “It is no coincidence that the beginning of the collapse of the old [New York] Times standards coincided almost exactly with the rise of the liberation movements of the last sixties and early seventies, particularly feminism,” Goldberg writes. So don’t be surprised when he invents mocking names for Clift—and when he invents silly tales about Carlson.

At any rate, Goldberg says that Margaret Carlson is the Mother of All Hillary-Gushers. Here at THE HOWLER, we found this odd, because we had recently noted Carlson’s exuberant bashing of Clinton. Carlson’s autobiography, Anyone Can Grow Up, appeared in your bookstores just last spring. In it, Carlson trashes the Clintons up and down, and yes, that includes her Queen Hillary. In her book, Carlson makes it sound as if Hillary’s friend, Vincent Foster, blamed the Clintons in his suicide note. And she offers mocking, foolish accounts of Hillary Clinton’s conduct and character (links below). Soon after we reviewed Carlson’s book, we also noted the mocking comments aimed at the Clintons when Carlson appeared on Charlie Rose (link below). If you want to retain an ounce of respect for Rose, we suggest you avoid our report.

Goldberg also borrowed the "work" of the always fact-challenged Media Research Center and Bob Somerby mentions an egregious example of fakery that defines "Arrogance", as much as it defined "Bias":

A FISHER OF RUBES: How big a fraud is Bernie Goldberg? Let’s return to that puzzling “quotation” from his new book, Arrogance—the quote we discussed in yesterday’s HOWLER (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 11/18/03). In his chapter about the New York Times, Bernie Goldberg thunders and rails about liberal demon Howell Raines:

GOLDBERG (page 66): A lot of people—and not just conservatives—think [the Times] hit rock bottom in 2001, when Howell Raines took over as executive editor…

Raines was famously quoted as saying that “the Reagan years oppressed me.” He has also declared that Reagan, a man beloved by millions of his countrymen, “couldn’t tie his shoelaces if his life depended on it.”

In contrast, there was his view of Bill Clinton: “Huge political talent,” declared Raines when Charlie Rose asked how he thought history would regard Clinton.

Raines loved Clinton, and just hated Reagan: It’s a message the talk-show right loves to hear. And Bernie had the perfect quote—a quote that could make readers feel like real victims! Ronald Reagan was loved by millions—but Raines rudely said he couldn’t tie his own shoes! Pseudo-con readers could cry all day long when they read the rude thing Raines had said.

But was the “quotation” actually accurate? Did Raines say that Ronald Reagan “couldn’t tie his shoelaces if his life depended on it?” In yesterday’s HOWLER, we voiced our suspicions about the oddly truncated quote. From Google searches, we knew that Goldberg had taken the quote from the archives of the Media Research Center. And as we noted, the MRC is pathologically dishonest; the influential org holds every world record for pulling “quotations” out of any sane context. We could find no record of the full quote, but we did notice something which made us suspicious. We knew the quote came from Raines’ book, Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis. And, since reviews had said that the book dealt in part with the way different presidents fished and tied flies, we couldn’t help wondering if the truncated quote had to do with Reagan’s skill on a stream. We knew, all too well, how the MRC works. We couldn’t help wondering if the truncated quote might concern the way Reagan tied flies!

And sure enough! Let’s face it, readers—if there’s a way to commit fraud with a “quote,” the MRC will find it. Readers sent us to amazon.com, where you can now search a book’s contents. We called up Fly Fishing, and sure enough! The “shoelaces” quote is on page 84. And yes, it deals with Reagan’s fishing—and it isn’t even Raines who is speaking!

Who actually makes the disturbing statement? Raines is out in the boonies with the late Dick Blalock, a legendary Maryland fishing guide. Blalock has Raines on a fast-running stream—and he talks about fisherman presidents:

RAINES (pages 83-84): Even here in northern Maryland, we were still below the Mason-Dixon line and technically still in the South. More to the point, we were in hillbilly territory. In the nineteenth century, these people tended whiskey stills…Now their descendants still lived back in the hollows of the Catoctins, experienced poachers of deer and turkey and of the fat trout in the fly-fishing-only section of Hunting Creek. In short, Dick Blalock had brought me to one of the northernmost outposts of the Redneck Way.

“See that pool?” said Dick. “That was Jimmy Carter’s favorite pool when he was President. We’re only about a mile from Camp David. The Fish and Wildlife boys kept the stream lousy with big brood fish from the hatcheries when he was up here. I knew a guy who used to slip in and give every big trout in the stream a sore lip whenever he heard Carter was coming. Of course, I liked Carter. Charlie Fox and Ben Schley taught him a lot about fishing, and he ties a good fly. Reagan couldn’t tie his shoelaces if his life depended on it.”

Amazing, isn’t it? But typical of the way Bernie Goldberg does business. In short, it was Blalock who made the statement, not Raines, as Bernie blusters to her misused, misled readers. And what was Blalock plainly saying? That Reagan didn’t know how to tie flies! That’s the actual context of the “quote” which the MRC has been flogging for years. And it’s flogged again in Bernie’s fake book, finally reaching a national audience. Bernie Goldberg is a fisher of rubes. And he’s reeling them in with this fakery.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that Goldberg has cadged a phony “quote” from the MRC. How big a fake is Bernie Goldberg? In Bias, he slandered Times writer Natalie Angier with a similar MRC cut-and-paste job. Years earlier, Angier—a science writer—had written a piece about insect reproduction. And the MRC had swung into action; they clipped a quote and made it sound like Angier had written a piece bashing men! (See THE DAILY HOWLER, 1/12/02. Prepare to emit mordant chuckles.) Bernie, of course, just cut-and-pasted—and ranted. The rough little man clipped the ludicrous “quote” and ranted and railed for the readers of Bias. Now, he cuts and pastes from an old fishing tale, and says that Raines trashed Ronald Reagan.

Somerby also posted an update showing the extent to which Bozell and the MRC are willing to fake their claims:

QUITE A STRETCH: Let’s have E-Mailer Joe explain it! Just how great is the MRC’s clowning? Here’s the message our e-mailer sent—after he explored the origins of that Howell Raines “shoelaces” quote:

E-MAILER JOE (11/19/03): One more note on the “shoelaces” quote that Goldberg lifts from the MRC.

The Howler from today notes: “As we noted, the MRC is pathologically dishonest; the influential org holds every world record for pulling ‘quotations’ out of any sane context.” Luckily, the magic of the Internet gives us the tools to put that thesis to the test.

The earliest cite of the shoelaces quote delivered by the MRC’s own search engine comes from May 5, 1994. In its long-running “Notable Quotables” feature, the MRC shows us Howell Raines’ unspeakable bias:

“Then one day in the summer of 1981 I found myself at the L.L. Bean store in Freeport, Maine. I was a correspondent in the White House in those days, and my work—which consisted of reporting on President Reagan’s success in making life harder for citizens who were not born rich, white, and healthy—saddened me…My parents raised me to admire generosity and to feel pity. I had arrived in our nation’s capital [in 1981] during a historic ascendancy of greed and hard-heartedness…Reagan couldn’t tie his shoelaces if his life depended on it.” —New York Times editorial page editor (and former Washington Bureau Chief) Howell Raines in his book Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis.

However, having read my Howler regularly and taken its lessons to heart, I questioned that last ellipsis. The logic of the passage doesn’t seem to flow very well from “a historic ascendancy of greed and hard-heartedness” to “Reagan couldn’t tie his shoelaces.” So what’s missing in between? Nothing much—just 28 pages of text! The portion of the “quote” before the ellipsis occurs on page 56 of Raines’ book. The “shoelaces” reference appears on page 84. What do the journalistic stylebooks say about this rather loose abuse of three little dots?

What do the stylebooks say? Here at THE HOWLER, we don’t really know. Most likely, writers of those journalistic stylebooks never dreamed of such total fakery—never dreamed that they’d have to confront such startling attempts at deception. At any rate, E-Mailer Joe is far too kind when he refers to this “rather loose abuse.” This “quote” which the MRC stitched together is typical of that org’s endless clowning. As we’ve seen, the “shoelaces” quote (from page 84) concerned Reagan’s fishing, and it wasn’t even spoken by Raines. But Brent Bozell didn’t want you to know that. So he and his gang—well, they made quite a stretch! Their ellipsis stretched across 28 pages—and it showed their contempt for your discourse.

[According to Somerby, the MRC then posted something saying it “regrets the confusion” about that “shoelaces” quote."]

Here's another case where Goldberg used fraudster John Lott's work to claim bias, based on an incident in the Appalachian School of Law. Tim Lambert at Deltoid reviewed this:

Bernard Goldberg and John Lott, birds of a feather

Lott’s favourite example of the “Bias Against Guns” is the story of the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law. Lott performed a superficial analysis of the news stories about the shootings and found that very few of the stories mentioned the fact that two of the students involved in apprehending the killer were armed. Lott concluded that reporters deliberately left out this fact because they were biased, but my more careful analysis finds that the first stories published did not mention the guns because the reporters did not know about them, while the later stories were about different aspects of that matter.

Bernard Goldberg has a new book Arrogance where he makes the same argument and repeats Lott’s superficial analysis. He was interviewed on CNBC by Tim Russert on Nov 15:

Mr. GOLDBERG: That’s—that story, Tim—you know, I told you I don’t believe in conspiracies, but this one makes me wonder. Early last year a student at the Appalachian Law School in Grundy, Virginia, went on a shooting spree. He killed a bunch of people. He killed three people, including the dean and a professor and a—a student and shot and wounded three other students. It’s a blue-collar law school, so a lot of the students there have jobs. And two of them had jobs in law enforcement. When they heard the shooting—and the campus was running all over the place. People were ducking for cover and everything. This guy was just shooting up the place. They went to their cars and got their guns—and—and I did a lot of reporting on this, and tracked down one of the major figures involved, and they walked up to the guy with their guns from two different directions, these two students, and they said, `Put down your gun,’ and—and then they wrestled him to the ground.

In fact, only one student, Tracy Bridges said that he pointed his gun at the killer. Goldberg neglects to mention that Bridges’ account is disputed by Ted Besen, who says that the killer put his gun down before Bridges arrived and that there are no witnesses who saw Bridges pointing the gun.

I got a call from a criminologist, a scholar—a scholar, who said that he had done a search on the computer and found 204 stories on this, and only four mentioned that the students who subdued the gunman, who tackled the gunman as—as all the papers and networks put it, also had guns. I didn’t believe that. That could not be true; four out of 200. So I did a little research on my own, and I found some guy at the University of Iowa who ran two separate studies, and he came up with pretty much the same numbers, pretty much. I didn’t believe it. I did my own study. I went to Nexis and found the 100 biggest news organizations in America, which included the networks and the—and all the big papers, that covered the story, and I found six. Four of them in the area, making it a local story for them—six that reported that the two gunmen—that the two students also had guns to subdue him. They didn’t simply tackle him. They didn’t simply subdue the guy. They used guns.

Of course, the scholar he refers to is John Lott.

And I was—I was saying to myself, `Why would you leave out such a crucial piece of info—that is crucial. All I could come up with is that, since many reporters are liberal—most—almost all are liberal—and since many liberals don’t just not like guns, but they’re anti-gun, to—to do a story that says guns sometimes—sometimes are used to prevent more violence, sometimes guns are used defensively for good, that just didn’t fit the preconceived notions. And by the way, that’s what the book is about, the preconceived notions that reporters come to the story with. And on guns, the preconceived notion is simply guns are bad.

Or if he had taken a little care in his analysis, he might have noticed that, for example, reporter Rex Bowman did not mention the guns in his Jan 17 story but did mention them in his Jan 18 story and figured out that Bowman didn’t mention them on Jan 17 because he didn’t know about them. But then Goldberg would not have had this example for his book.

By the way, I think America is broken up into two groups about guns, so I’m going to give you my own bias. I’m not a gun person. I don’t like guns. But I’m not anti-gun. I wish everybody on my street, where I live in Miami, has a gun. You know, I think it would be a safer place if everybody had a gun. But that—that goes beyond, you know, just group think. That almost goes to group lying.

RUSSERT: But now when you raise this issue—I’m immediately curious, did the students actually fire their guns?

Mr. GOLDBERG: No.

RUSSERT: Were their guns in their cars?

Mr. GOLDBERG: Yes.

RUSSERT: Were they bringing their guns to school?

Mr. GOLDBERG: Yeah.

RUSSERT: Were they licensed guns? I mean, it’s a whole sidebar story.

Mr. GOLDBERG: That’s right. By the way, the—there’s a sidebar I did not put in this book, but I’ll tell you—and I should have. I didn’t learn about it till later. When—when somebody involved in looking into this called the Associated Press and spoke to a major, major editor there, and said, `Your guy didn’t’—talking about the Associated Press, `Your guy didn’t put this in his story,’ the editor was shocked, but not shocked because his reporter left it out of the story, shocked that these other students had guns that they brought to campus with them, and then put—took them out of their car, and God knows what might have happened if these two guys started shooting. That’s what he was shocked about.

Now this comes from a story (registration required) by Rick Montgomery in the Kansas City Star on the controversy about the media coverage of the shootings. Unlike Goldberg, Montgomery presents both sides of the debate, so Goldberg must be well aware that Besen contradicts Bridges’ account and that reporters did not mention the gun because they did not know about it. If Goldberg had bothered to tell his readers about these facts it would have undercut his message about media bias, so he just left them out. Montgomery’s story presents both sides of the question, while Goldberg’s is deliberately one-sided. Goldberg complains about media bias when the bias is his own.

You know, Tim, I said there are slivers of sunshine, but when I even hear myself telling stories like this, I say these guys are so arrogant. They better wise up. They better wise up because if they don’t change, they’re going to become the journalistic equivalent of the leisure suit; harmless enough but hopelessly out of date.

Goldberg needs to wise up. He can no longer get away with deliberately distorted accounts in his books because some blogger will check the facts and expose him.

RUSSERT: It is so important when you have an issue like guns, now matter how you feel, the fact is, the National Rifle Association does represent a sizable number of Americans…

Mr. GOLDBERG: Oh, yeah.

RUSSERT: …state their opinion accurately, and Americans for Gun Control have their view. Put both views out there and let people make their own decision as to how—where they come down.

Mr. GOLDBERG: But people get angry. There was one guy who went on a Web site and he really started putting stuff out that the gunman had already put his gun down before the students went up with their guns. That’s not totally true. The students came up with their guns. They said, `Put your gun down.’ The st—the guy had run out of bullets, was in the process of putting his gun down. He may have been going to the car to get more bullets. The fact that they had guns, these other students, no journalist could argue that that’s not relevant. Yet only six news organizations out of the top 100 reported that the subduers, the tacklers—tacklers—had guns.

“One guy who went on a Web site”? That would be me. (If you google for “Appalachian School of Law”, my blog shows up in the first page of results.) Notice how he just says “putting stuff out” rather than saying that I was reporting the eyewitness account of Ted Besen. And if Goldberg had bothered to read all the stories about the shootings he would have known that the killer did not have more ammunition in his car.

In another interview, Goldberg repeats the story and adds this detail:

And then I found one of the guys, Tracy Bridges, one of the students and had a long talk with him. And he told me—he said, ‘I spoke with about a hundred reporters. I told every one of them what happened.’

This is interesting. Last year Bridges said he spoke to over 50 reporters. Now the number has grown to a hundred. If Bridges embellished his account of the number of reporters how do we know he didn’t embellish his account of his gun use? After all, the first time he told it, he didn’t saying anything about pointing his gun at the killer.

Somerby covered another aspect of this case:

GOLDBERG (page 186): I sampled one hundred news sources, which included the major TV outlets and most every big city daily in the country. And what I found stunned me. Sure enough, only a few papers in the whole country reported that the rescuers had guns. I counted a grand total of six out a hundred. Six!

As you’ll note, Bernie’s a bit rusty at research. First he says that he sampled “one hundred news sources.” Three sentences later, he changes his tale; now he reports what he found in a hundred newspapers. (Yes, it makes a difference. Keep reading.) But no matter! Bernie rails for page after page about the way the American press suppressed the fact that “the rescuers had guns.” But “giving credit where it’s due,” he names the six papers that did cite the guns. “[T]he papers were the New York Times, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Lexington Herald-Leader, the Charlotte Observer, the Asheville Citizen-Times, and the Roanoke Times and World News,” Bernie admiringly says.

For the record, even an amateur will note a few things about Bernie’s list of good papers. Five of these papers hail from the law school’s geographic area; these are local newspapers, papers that gave the Appalachian killings oodles of coverage. For example, are you surprised to learn that the Roanoke paper provided more detail than the Seattle Times did? This is hardly surprising (details below). And even a novice will note something else. According to Bernie, the New York Times did mention the guns; by contrast, the Washington Times did not. In a story alleging liberal bias, this may strike you as a bit odd. Oh yes, one more point. Although Bernie knew enough not to say so, at least one network TV show did mention the use of the guns. On the morning after the shootings, the Today show interviewed one of the students who subdued the killer—and yes, the students’ guns were mentioned. So let’s see: Katie Couric and the New York Times mentioned the guns. But the Washington Times did not—and neither did Brit Hume’s Special Report, which reported the story that night. Weird, isn’t it? According to Bernie, Hume and the Washington Times showed liberal bias; Couric and the New York Times did not. Do you see how strange reality gets when Bernie Goldberg begins firing in the air?

But a wider look at the news reporting shows how fake Bernie’s work really is. According to Bernie, anti-gun bias was “the only plausible reason” for failure to mention the rescuers’ gun. But that statement by Bernie is simply untrue. And Bernie G surely understood that. Why didn’t newspapers mention those guns? There seem to be several obvious reasons—reasons Bernie dumped from his book.

Why didn’t newspapers mention the guns? How about this: How about the fact that the “rescuers’ guns” seem to have played no role in the rescue? A bit of background information will help: By March of 2002, the NRA was complaining about the gun-free coverage of this incident. In response, the Kansas City Star’s Rick Montgomery did what Bernie refuses to do; he actually conducted a full investigation, and he reported a full range of facts. In particular, Montgomery interviewed two of the students who tackled the killer; he also interviewed the Virginia State Police. And the story that emerged from Montgomery’s research is quite different from the claptrap in Arrogance. Did students “get the guns and use them to subdue the killer?” On balance, it seems they did not. Here’s the part of Montgomery’s piece where he begins to examine this question:

MONTGOMERY: A nagging wrinkle figures into the law-school shootings: Whose version is true?

The Star recently interviewed two students involved—[Tracy] Bridges and [Ted] Besen. They gave differing accounts.

Bridges repeated that he pointed his weapon at Odighizuwa and ordered the suspect to put his own down, which he did.

According to Besen, the first student to tackle the suspect, nothing of the sort happened. He said Odighizuwa set down the gun and raised his arms—“like he was mocking everyone: ha, ha, what are you going to do now?”—before the students confronted him.

The two armed students had not yet arrived at the scene, Besen said: “Peter had no knowledge anyone had a gun.”

Virginia State Police confirmed Odighizuwa’s weapon was empty by then.

So two different students told two different stories! In Arrogance, of course, Bernie only mentions Bridges—the students whose story he likes. Meanwhile, Montgomery spoke to the State Police too. And the State Police contradict Bernie:

MONTGOMERY (continuing directly): Police spokesman Mike Stater said the armed students did assist after Besen and another student, Todd Ross, tackled the gunman. Bridges sat on the suspect while Gross, also armed, provided handcuffs he had gotten from his car.

But to Stater’s view, the biggest heroes were Besen and Ross—the unarmed men who lunged at Odighizuwa.

Whose account is correct? We simply don’t know. But according to the State Police, the armed students arrived on the scene after Odighizuwa was tackled. Why were unarmed students able to subdue him? His gun was out of bullets, Stater said—a point which no one disputes. By the way, even Bridges didn’t mention his heroic gun-pointing until several days after the incident. See his full statement below.

So why didn’t newspapers mention the guns? One possible reason is obvious—when they interviewed students and the State Police, no one thought the rescuers’ guns had played any role in the rescue. But there are other clear reasons for the absence of guns from most newspaper stories. Why didn’t newspapers mention the guns? Duh! For most newspapers around the country, this was a quite minor story. We’re not sure how Bernie’s search allowed him to sample “a hundred newspapers;” at present, Nexis archives show far fewer papers reporting the shooting incident. (We count only 46 in the first five days post-event. This includes such giants as the Fremont, California Argus, which devoted about 100 words to the story.) But at any rate, for most newspapers which mentioned the story, it was a very minor item. Remember the Seattle Times, for example. Here was their next-day report:

SEATTLE TIMES (1/17/02):
Dismissed law student kills dean, professor, wounds 3

GRUNDY, Va. A student who had been dismissed from law school went on a campus shooting spree yesterday, killing the dean, a professor and a student before he was tackled by students, authorities said.

The attack also wounded three female students at the Appalachian School of Law. They were hospitalized in fair condition.

Authorities said the 42-year-old suspect, Peter Odighizuwa, had arrived at school to meet with the dean about his academic dismissal, which went into effect yesterday.

That was it! The Times ran a few dozen words from the AP report. The next day, the Times ran an update:

SEATTLE TIMES (1/18/02)
Update

Peter Odighizuwa, a former law student charged with capital murder in the shooting deaths of three people at Appalachian School of Law, told a court in Grundy, Va., yesterday that he is sick and needs help. Prosecutor Sheila Tolliver said she will seek the death penalty.

That was it! You’d never know it from reading Arrogance, but most papers gave this story extremely limited coverage, or gave it no coverage at all. Given the length of the paper’s dispatches, is it really surprising that the Seattle Times failed to mention the rescuers’ guns? No, it isn’t surprising at all. Bernie doesn’t mention this because he knows that it kills his fake story.

So according to the State Police, the “rescuers’ guns” played no role in the capture. And many newspapers only devoted a couple of lines to the story. But there’s another reason why most newspapers didn’t mention the guns, a reason Bernie omits from his piece so he can vent in full fury. Why didn’t newspapers mention the guns? Most newspapers which covered this story did just what the Seattle Times did—they ran some small part of the AP report. And since Roger Alford’s January 16 AP report hadn’t mentioned the rescuers’ guns, it’s hardly surprising that these far-flung papers didn’t mention them either. But you know Bernie! He pretends to have pawed through the nation’s newspapers, then he expresses his sense of shock at their repeated failure to mention the guns. But in the case of most of these papers, he is simply counting the same AP story again and again, getting angrier each time he reads it. Yes, this is a case of high clowning. But then, that’s how this phony man works.

Another point about Arrogance highlighted by Somerby:

But what makes Bernie a major-league phony? In the two years since Bias appeared, a number of writers have offered critiques of the book’s major claims. For example, Eric Alterman challenged Bias in What Liberal Media; incomparably citing our own critiques, Alterman took on some of Bernie’s assertions right in his opening chapter. Indeed, Alterman did what real writers do; he repeated claims which Bernie had made, and then he offered contradictory evidence. In the rest of his book, Alterman sketched a nuanced theory about the press corps’ varying tendencies. Why, it tells you that right on the dust jacket: “Alterman finds the media to be far more conservative than liberal, though it is possible to find evidence for both views.”

But how did Bernie respond to such work? Simple! He simply ignored it! Alterman doesn’t appear in Arrogance; the research he cited is MIA too. Instead, Bernie offers clipped accounts of what liberals have said about media bias. He starts with Al Gore’s claim, in November 2002, that a group of conservative news orgs were “injecting the daily Republican talking points into the definition of what’s objective as stated by the news media as a whole.” Quickly, Bernie swung into action. We quote at length for a reason:

GOLDBERG (page 7): Once Al Gore spoke the gospel of conservative bias, it took only seconds for left-of-center journalists to start hopping on board the bandwagon.

“Al Gore said the obvious,” wrote the left-wing New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

“The legend of the liberal media is finally dead,” proclaimed Joe Conason, the liberal columnist of the New York Observer.

“Sooner or later, I think we’re all going to have to acknowledge that the myth of liberal bias in the press is just that, it’s a myth,” according to Jack White, one of TIME magazine’s liberal columnists.

The true “new bias,” according to E. J. Dionne Jr., one of the many liberal columnists at the Washington Post, “adds up to [a] media heavily biased toward conservative politics and conservative politicians.”

All nuance is gone from what these writers have said, and Goldberg makes no attempt to produce or refute their real arguments. Instead, he overstates what they have alleged, and ridicules them for their “culture of denial.” “Deny! Deny! Deny!” he writes, as if repetition could replace a real argument. But it isn’t as if he presents no rebuttal. On page 9, Bernie quotes a joke by Jay Leno—a joke which implied that liberal bias exists. “The joke got a great big laugh,” Bernie says, “which ought to tell us something.” To Bernie, if Leno’s audience thinks that it’s true, that’s pretty much good enough.

But then, Goldberg is the consummate lightweight—the king of cut-and-paste pseudo-journalism. Did the media trash Clinton, then trash Gore? In Arrogance, that doesn’t matter. Bernie says that the media are liberal all the same—and later, he tries to claim that the New York Times pandered to Clinton and Gore (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 11/18/03). Howell Raines loved Clinton, he plainly implies—and he doesn’t tell his conservative readers that Raines trashed Clinton for year after year. The Times pandered to Candidate Gore, he implies. That too is major-league hooey, of course, as Alterman details in one whole chapter. But did we mention that Alterman didn’t make Bernie’s book? Neither does Campaign 2000! Incredibly, Bernie has written two full books about the corps’ liberal bias without mentioning the way they trashed Gore.

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