The Media Falsely Accused

Eight years ago, veteran CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg penned an indictment of the liberal media on the vigorously conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. He incurred so much disdain from his peers in the industry that he decided to expand the argument into a regular manifesto. His embittered treatise, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, is now in its fifth week on The New York Times bestseller list and has won the attention of such dubious litterati as George W. Bush.

While it is ineloquently written and wretchedly argued, the book's success seems to vindicate Goldberg; if millions of Americans bought the hardback, the reasoning goes, how could its accusations be untrue? But the success comes more from brilliant planning than persuasive writing.

Goldberg's genius is this: by merely publishing his book, he proved himself right. If the media had disregarded the tract, they would have proved the point that liberal media ignore conservatives. To prove it wrong, the media had to cover Bias, and in doing so, they lent it undue legitimacy that Goldberg and conservatives have interpreted as vindication.

Ironically, the coverage was so thorough that it acted as a forceful publicity tool--more effective than Goldberg's publisher, Regnery, could ever have orchestrated on its own. Bias flew off the shelves at breakneck speed, reaching more readers than a book of its quality ever should and climbing the charts. From the bully pulpit of the bestseller lists, Goldberg has claimed with immunity that the vast public approval endows his theory with credence. Savvy readers reserve credence for credible arguments, which Goldberg lacks, but one thing is for sure: Goldberg ingeniously conceived a book that would have proved him right had he failed and right had he succeeded.

Unfortunately for the ongoing debate about media bias, the book's contribution is significant only for its unprecedented success. It misidentifies bias, misclassifies liberalism, misses methodology, and mistreats statistics.

Bias, Real and Ephemeral

Goldberg is not unreasonable in his indictment of the media. He does not pretend there is a systematic plan to slant the news leftward, nor does he hysterically decry a vast left-wing conspiracy. His criticism is more underhanded: he suggests that news personalities slant the news leftward because they are unconscious prey to their own prejudices.

"No conspiracies. No deliberate attempts to slant the news. It just happens. Because the way reporters and editors see the world, the way their friends and colleagues see the world, matters," Goldberg writes. His classification of inadvertent media bias would be a potent one if he didn't contradict it himself.

One of Goldberg's best illustrations of bias is an alleged conversation with his boss at CBS, Andrew Heyward, who told him, "Look, Bernie, of course there's a liberal bias in the news. All the networks tilt left. Come on, we all know it--the whole damn world knows it."

The conversation, if it ever took place, is a small victory for conservative media critics, but it doesn't help Goldberg's analysis of unconscious bias. Heyward and "the whole damn world" seem well aware of the predominant ideology.

If Heyward is right and the media is knowingly left--Goldberg makes no effort to refute this point--then Goldberg's analysis is corrupt. No agenda could be simultaneously conscious and unconscious. And a willfully liberal news media contradicts Goldberg's defense that there are "no conspiracies. No deliberate attempts to slant the news." Goldberg can't even determine his own position.

Will the Real Goldberg Please Stand Up?

Because Goldberg knows the "liberal media" could dismiss Bias as a reactionary diatribe just as easily as he hurls eldritch accusations, he goes to great lengths to show that he's not a scheming conservative behind the veneer of an evenhanded journalist. Unfortunately for his credibility, he is just that.

Enumerating his "traditional" liberal credentials, Goldberg bashes working mothers, affirmative action, "sexism masquerading as feminism," and the "homeless lobby." (He fails to discriminate between a lobby, which few penniless demographics can afford, and an advocacy movement.)

In an aggressively ill-conceived analogy, he ponders affirmative action, writing, "Why should the children of Jesse Jackson or Colin Powell or Diana Ross get some kind of racial preference when they apply to college or go out for a job, but no ëaffirmative action' is given to the child of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant coal miner from West Virginia?"

"I see myself as an old-fashioned liberal. I'm a liberal the way liberals used to be," he writes [italics his].

But liberalism is, by definition, a progressive ideology, constantly reconsidering the bounds of traditional politics. In an interview, I asked Goldberg if being a liberal "the way liberals used to be" makes him a conservative by today's standards.

"Yeah, to be perfectly fair about it, I guess it does ... [but liberals] have abandoned us and not the other way around," he told me. Goldberg follows proudly in the tradition of the George Wallace Democrat.

Goldberg's Laundry List

The news media is no small institution. It is a multi-billion dollar-a-year market with tens of thousands of employees, and to level a sweeping accusation of political distortion requires finesse, subtlety, and in-depth research, all of which Goldberg foregoes. But the book's most egregious deficiency is its complete lack of methodology.

Goldberg charges the news media with adherence to a political dogma but fails to show that liberalism is a prevailing media trend. His case is all evidence, but it lacks a big-picture look at the industry.

While his anecdotes show that something fishy was afoot at CBS during his employment, the examples stop short of a cohesive approach. For instance, Goldberg successfully indicts CBS for telling a producer, "We have to be more careful next time," after a story about chain gangs showed "too many black prisoners," even though only one prisoner in the gang was white. But one, or even ten such examples, hardly prove the point the media are biased.

Despite the value in pointing out substandard journalism, Goldberg fails to illustrate a widespread problem. Using the same approach, an embittered liberal newsie could make an equally uncompelling case exposing conservative media bias by showing example after example. To be fair, I asked Goldberg whether his argument had a method to support it.

"I wouldn't call what I did methodology so much as gave examples as I saw them," he told me. He's absolutely right. He tells a disconcerting tale for each tale of media bias, but the tales lack a cohesive thread to bind them together.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Goldberg is not entirely unaware of his methodological shortcomings. He attempts to offset his specious procedure by making a different point with something more concrete than examples: statistics. The statistical approach is certainly more convincing than the exemplary one, but Goldberg runs into two major problems. First, he uses polling data to show that the news media are liberal because journalists are liberal. And second, statistics, as Mark Twain put it, are on the less reliable side of damned lies.

Goldberg cites a 1996 study by the Freedom Forum and the Roper Center, which found that 89 percent of Washington journalists voted for Bill Clinton and 50 percent were registered Democrats. However interesting these figures, they neglect that good journalism is evaluated by a reporter's treatment of sources and quotations, not his voting record.

Moreover, a seasoned journalist like Goldberg should know better than to rely on one survey. As always, pollsters' wording affects responses and no single poll is reliable. A 1998 poll by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, for instance, found that 66 percent of journalists identified themselves as socially center or right and 83 percent identified themselves as economically center or right.

Ironically, Goldberg blasts liberal reporters for their selective manipulation of figures and for exaggerating statistics. Apparently oblivious of his own argument, Goldberg hyperbolizes copiously, citing "America's ten-trillion-page tax code," tuition costs which are "about the same as the cost of the space shuttle," and Laurence Tribe's "ten million" CBS News appearances in the 1980s alone.

Liberalism by Default

If any period of American history yielded an infinitude of myths about "the liberal media," it was the Clinton-Gingrich 1990s, but the truth is that conservatives have always complained that the media are liberal.

Politically speaking, there may be truth to the observation that the news media are a hair left of center on social issues. They are also a hair to the right on economic issues. James Fallows addresses this point in his insightful book Breaking the News, observing that 50 years ago, journalists used to be working-class people; they felt for the common man because they were common men.

But today, journalists are overwhelmingly college-educated members of the middle class and have been for two or three generations. This accounts for the media's fundamentally middle class predispositions: social liberalism, fiscal conservatism, and an idiosyncratically paternalistic approach to covering minorities.

And there is an important, other type of liberalism that Goldberg neglects altogether: regardless of politics, the media may be an inherently liberal institution. The journalist's first moral charge is to hold the established powers accountable on behalf of the lay-public. That means distrusting official wisdom, grilling the leadership, and challenging the status quo.

Journalistic liberalism defies political affiliation. Its well-being is vital to our polity, and grumblers like Goldberg trivialize it by equating it with an agenda. The media may have an agenda, after all, but Goldberg misidentifies its causes and consequences, as well as its politics. And that is to say nothing of Goldberg's own bias.Adam B. Kushner is a Columbia College junior majoring in ancient studies.