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Book Review

‘Rube Goldberg’

Media bias is a hot topic, and has been for several years. No single author has gotten more mileage out of the bias issue than Bernard Goldberg, a veteran CBS correspondent who in 2001 hit the bestseller list with Bias, which firmly grasped one horn of the bias dilemma. To the question ‘Is the media biased?’ Goldberg firmly answers that the charge of liberal media bias is “so blatantly true that it’s hardly worth discussing anymore” (2001: 215). Goldberg has followed up on the success of Bias with his follow up, Arrogance, which goes further to contend that not only is the media dominated and controlled by ideological liberals, but that the journalistic culture is deeply elitist in sentiment and isolated from mainstream American values. Goldberg claims to offer this book in the spirit of constructive criticism, concluding his book with a set of recommendations modeled after a twelve-step program. Unfortunately, Goldberg’s tone too often slips into one-sided invective, and his recommendations for media reform are sufficiently bizarre to strain credulity.

Summary

Goldberg’s critique of the media is at once sweeping and vitriolic in tone. Arguing that the media elite exists in a ‘bubble’ of self-confirming liberal arrogance that is deeply out-of-touch with mainstream American values, Goldberg’s thesis asserts that liberals “have forgotten how to be liberal” (p. 36). He concedes that Republicans have certain friends in the media, but argues that Democrats have much more powerful friends in the major networks and newspapers of record (e.g. the New York Times and Washington Post), reinforcing his earlier claims that professional journalism’s commitment to norms of objectivity elide a default liberal orientation. This self-contained and mutually reinforcing liberal perspective of establishment journalists lends itself to dismissive attitude toward those who do not share their own views. A personal anecdote of Andy Rooney’s attempts to avoid his phone calls in the aftermath of Bias illustrates what Goldberg believes is a pervasive arrogance toward conservatives. As with his first book, he devotes considerable space relating various personal affronts and slights of former colleagues since the publication of Bias, thus highlighting what he interprets as a monolithic media culture.

For Goldberg, the principal sin of liberal arrogance is hypocrisy, and he offers numerous examples of hypocritical and unethical behavior he attributes as a byproduct of the arrogance of liberal news anchors, journalists, and editors. For example, he cites a Maureen Dowd column in which she uses ellipses to change the meaning of a statement by George W. Bush.^[1]  Another illustration of the establishment media’s hostility to conservatives is a quote Goldberg attributes to Howell Raines, the liberal former editor of the New York Times. Goldberg states that Raines “has also declared that Reagan, a man beloved by tens of millions of his countrymen, the president credited with bringing down the Soviet empire, ‘couldn’t tie his shoelaces if his life depended on it” (p. 67).

The hypocrisy that Goldberg attributes to the elite media is promoted in the kinds of stories that find their way into print on onto network news programs. On the one hand, white liberal guilt leads media executives into an inflexible alliance with civil rights leaders like Jesse Jackson, which Goldberg argues “makes it impossible for liberals to join with conservatives on anything having to do with race (p. 101). On the other hand, Goldberg argues that liberal support for affirmative action leads to balkanization of newsrooms in the form of minority interest groups within the news media. Ultimately, Goldberg sneers, “…as far as the news media elites are concerned, diversity is only skin-deep” (p. 107). For Goldberg, as for many conservatives, the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times is symptomatic of the liberal capture by the ‘blacks-as-victims’ crowd that is more interested in securing personal advancement than in genuine equal opportunity. All too often, stories of missing minority children are ignored, while the media focuses immense portions of the news cycle to missing white children and young women.

The book’s 299 pages are broken up into 38 chapters, most of which follow this theme that the media’s ideological bias leads to hypocrisy, partial coverage that reaffirms a liberal world-view, and ultimately deepens average American’s disaffection toward the media. In one chapter, for example, Goldberg analyzed media coverage of a school shooting that occurred at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia.^[2]  According to Goldberg, what made this story newsworthy is that the shooter in this event was subdued by several students who themselves used guns to ‘overpower’ the gunman. Conducting his own Lexis-Nexis search, Goldberg pronounced himself ‘stunned’ to discover that in a search of one hundred news sources, “only a few papers in the whole country reported the rescuers had guns” (p. 186). That many newspapers then used this case to editorialize their opposition to private ownership of handguns simply reaffirms Goldberg’s belief that a liberal media embraces a reflexive anti-gun bias.

Thirteen of the final fourteen chapters are devoted to various prescriptions Goldberg offers to remedy this disease of liberal arrogance. The chief elements of Goldberg’s 12-step cure include:

• Face up to the problem, and admit that the media has an industry-wide bias problem;
• Move out of New York and Washington, and relocate to places like Tupelo, Mississippi, Mitchell, South Dakota, and Oklahoma City, where ‘real people live’;
• Introduce meaningful diversity into the newsroom, and ban all newsroom caucuses;
• Spend more time on the issue of bias in journalism schools;
• Stop following the New York Times lead for stories that will dominate the news cycle;
• Don’t ‘stack the deck’ in terms of labeling ideological perspectives (Goldberg argues that conservatives receive such labeling treatment disproportionately);
• Provide more context for stories, and relate all sides of a story in an impartial manner;
• Don’t confuse journalist with activist;
• Make bias a punishable offense (setting up a website devoted to exposing journalists who abuse their power to score ideological points);
• Expand your rolodex (e.g. include conservative interest groups as sources for stories related to their issues);
• Stop taking it personally (he uses a quote from Benjamin Franklin: “Our critics are our friends, they show us our faults”).^[3]

Analysis

Conservatives will find plenty of red meat in Goldberg. Much of his narrative is written in the kind of resentful, denigrated minority tone that conservatives have mastered over the past generation. Even his twelve-step program, purportedly offered to ‘save liberal elites from themselves,’ Goldberg’s voice is sufficiently corrosive as to alienate all but the most inflexible conservatives. If anything, Arrogance outstrips his previous bestseller in what Howard Kurtz describes as a “smug, us-and-them tone”, adding that “[m]aybe bestselling writers can get away with that sort of thing”.^[4] Given the fairly disappointing sales of Arrogance, perhaps even bestselling authors can ill afford to preach to such a small choir. In one sense, at least, I suspect that Goldberg fundamentally misinterpreted the success of Bias, where he advanced a fairly specific set of claims in anecdotal form; in contrast, Arrogance is so sweeping its claims as to even strike fair-minded conservatives as gratuitous.

Beyond its hyperbolic tone, Arrogance contains many of the same flaws that critics detected in his earlier work. First, Goldberg’s evidence is almost exclusively anecdotal. While anecdotes are certainly a kind of evidence, they are not the kind of systematic, duplicable evidence that a social scientist might find persuasive. Goldberg’s few attempts at systematic research are of the ‘Google/Lexis-Nexus’ variety, which at times is an invaluable research tool, but is all too vulnerable either to misinterpretation or the same kind of malicious twisting Goldberg rightly denounces in Times columnist Maureen Dowd. Goldberg himself succumbs to the same kind of twisting in his claim that liberal editor Howell Raines said of Ronald Reagan that ‘he couldn’t tie his own shoes.’ It turns out upon closer inspection to have been drawn from a book Raines wrote on fly-fishing.^[5] Moreover, the attributed quote was not Raines himself, but rather an elderly fishing guide named Dick Blaylock, who lived in Maryland Camp David, and who has fly-fished with many presidents, including Reagan, who apparently could not tie his own lures.^[6]

Another illustration of Goldberg’s maladroit research is the chapter on the Appalachian school shooting. Part of the problem with such a Lexis-Nexis search that Goldberg claims to have conducted is that he probably didn’t control for AP/UPI wire stories; the further away from Virginia the story was, the less likely it was that newspapers would have taken the trouble of sending a reporter to the scene. It’s all-too-likely that most of the stories he noted were simply a wire story, and the editorial pages that called for gun control probably knew little more than what was in the AP story. Placed in context, Goldberg’s claim to have been ‘stunned’ seems disingenuous. That much of Goldberg’s ‘research’ appears to originate from the Family Research Center website, and very conservative website operated by Brent Bozell III, will further undermine Goldberg’s claim to be an honest broker.

More troubling still is the sweeping and untempered nature of claims Goldberg repeatedly attributes to the sins of ‘liberalism.’ For example, Goldberg claims that liberalism is the wellspring of editorial decisions to cover missing white children but not minority children. Such a claim might strike a less ideologically tainted observer as a wild and irresponsible misattribution: corporate self-interest is a far more logical culprit. Goldberg blames the Jayson Blair scandal on the New York Times’ liberal editorial staff’s commitment to affirmative action. Fair enough. But in the aftermath of the Stephen Glass, Rick Bragg, and Jack Kelley scandals, perhaps Goldberg can be forgiven for failing to predict the journalistic frailties of white male reporters. The silence from conservative pundits on the Kelley case is especially telling. Looking at the Blair and Kelley cases suggests a deeper problem than liberal commitment to affirmative action – a weakening of journalistic accountability – to explain the recent examples of journalistic misconduct.

A more likely cause for the rise of plagiarism among journalists is a perversion of professional standards by business imperatives, which mandate cutting newsroom budgets, and often stretches reporters so thinly that they are tempted to take shortcuts. Goldberg should know something about this trend in the media, but apparently his experience offers no insight into the distinction between liberal arrogance and corporate greed. Nonetheless, the two problems are distinctive, and Goldberg fails to make a persuasive case for conflating ideological elitism with economic imperatives.

Likewise, several of Goldberg’s proposals are reasonable and worthy of consideration.^[7] However, most of Goldberg’s proposals border on the ridiculous, and several would likely create more problems than they would solve. For example, moving the media to where the majority of Americans live would likely substitute an out-of-touch, parochial, and conservative media for the one we must presently endure, unless Goldberg is advocating the dissolution of the media gigantism that is destroying local newspaper, radio, and television coverage. The problem of liberal elitism in the established media is the problem of media majoritarianism: just check out the voter registration is the largest cities where the media are located. In the end, that is an unavoidable reality of modernity: the big stories happen in the larger cities, whose inhabitants tend to be more cosmopolitan, and hence more liberal, than the denizens of small towns and the interior states, whose conservativism is often an oppositional response to the hedonistic realities of larger cities.

Conclusion

Goldberg is speaking on a topic that demands attention. The problem of bias is inevitable when speaking on so important a subject as the role the media plays in our nation’s politics, precisely because the media has such a large responsibility. That journalists are often accused of failing to exercise objectivity in their selection and interpretation of facts to include in a story is illustrative of the uncomfortable position in which journalists find themselves. At a time when the ideal of objectivity is perhaps as vital and necessary to meaningful political discourse in this country, the very idea of objective journalism faces serious threat from those who doubt the utility of a serious discourse detached from ideological conviction.

I would like to be able to say that Bernard Goldberg has offered a meaningful contribution to the debate. Unfortunately, Goldberg makes for a poor standard bearer for the conservative cause: his reasonable arguments are muted by self-serving platitudes, and his most inflammatory claims are so poorly substantiated that they are relatively easily rebutted. While I would not place Goldberg in the company of such uncompromising conservative propagandists as Ann Coulter, I cannot endorse his balkanized partisan invective. Undoubtedly, arrogance exists in the media; just as clearly, Goldberg is not a part of the solution; he is a part of the problem.

^[1] Dowd’s reading of Bush’s speech was the following: “That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated … They’re not a problem anymore.” What Bush actually said was “Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top Al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. Either way, they’re not a problem anymore.”

^[2] The basics of the story are as follows: an angry student notified of an impending suspension went on a shooting spree on campus, killing the law school’s dean, a professor, and a fellow student. He shot and wounded three other students before three students pounced on him after he had run out of ammunition.

^[3] While the quotation is certainly apt, Franklin is probably an unfortunate exemplar of the kind of tolerance Goldberg advocates, given that Franklin himself was notoriously thin-skinned, and broke so decisively with his eldest son over the revolutionary war that he never spoke to him again.

^[4] Howard Kurtz (2003) “Writing Hot on the Trail of Lefty,” The Washington Post, Style Section, p. C01.

^[5] The book in question is Raines (1993) Fly-fishing Through the Midlife Crisis, New York, William Morrow and Company, Inc. The quote is on p. 84.

^[6] Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler webblog caught this problem. See The Daily Howler, Wednesday, November 19, 2003.

^[7] In particular, the argument for ‘real diversity’ and the call for greater context to stories might strike both liberal and conservative media scholars as reasonable, although they might disagree on what such proposals would involve.