THE NAKED EMPEROR STRIKES BACK?:

Welcome To The Post-Bias Media (Edward B. Driscoll, Jr., 05/05/2004, Tech Central Station)

When I spoke to him in early April of 2004, [Bernard Goldberg] told me, that coming from a liberal journalist who had been in the media since 1967, first with CBS, and now HBO, "I think that Bias made the issue far more mainstream than it was before. I think that before that, the complaints came from almost exclusively from conservative places, like talk radio and the Media Research Center.
 
"In the beginning when the book came out", Goldberg adds, "media elites ignored it. Then, when they couldn't ignore it, because it hit The New York Times' bestseller list, some of them got incredibly nasty and mean spirited, and personal."
 
How nasty? Michael Kinsley described Bias as "this dumb book." The Washington Post's Tom Shales called Goldberg a "disgruntled has-been." And those were some of their more polite phrases. "But by doing all that," Goldberg says, "there was such a buzz that the subject couldn't be ignored anymore. Peter Jennings was talking about it, and Dan Rather was talking about it, and Tom Brokaw was talking about it, and the editor of the LA Times was talking about it, and the new editor of the New York Times was talking about it."
 
And the subject of media bias was out of the bottle in a way that it hadn't been before, Goldberg says. "I take no credit, by the way, for it being out there, except that I caught up with the American people. It was always out there, but it was not out there coming from a mainstream journalist, who had never been accused by his one employer of 28 years of having a bias -- not once.
 
"That's what I think changed the landscape."

A personal favorite was when ABC fired Bob Zelnick for writing a biography of Al Gore that didn't seem likely to toe the Peter Jennings line.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 9, 2004 9:08 AM