Why did you choose the side you're on?

What made you become a fervent Democrat or Republican or Libertarian or Independent or whatever?

It has been repeatedly demonstrated in this forum that an article plucked off the internet is rarely reliable to give the whole view of any issue and some are so wrong they have little or no credibility.

But isn't it mostly the media that frames our political views? How else do we know what we know?

Apologies for the length of the article posted below, but it says so much better than I could how the media 'tilts' information to favor the political or ideological position of the reporter, talking head, commentator, etc.

IMPORTANT: This article comes down harder on the left mostly because the ones it discusses voted 89% Democrat in the last few elections. It is clear, however, that conservative media types do no better in being completely objective in the information they put out.

Left-eyed Media
By Lowell Ponte
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 14, 2001


BOTH A RIGHT AND LEFT EYE are needed to see the world in perspective. Close one eye and your vision shrinks from three dimensions to two, losing its parallax perception of distance and depth. The one-eyed may be king in the land of the blind, as the old Spanish saying holds, but even the giant Cyclops was no match for Homer's two-eyed hero Odysseus.

The unblinking eye - symbol of CBS - is a left eye of narrow and limited vision, according to Bernard Goldberg. He should know. For 28 years - half his life - Goldberg worked inside the "Tiffany Network," first in its Atlanta and San Francisco bureaus and from 1981 until 2000 as a National Correspondent with anchor Dan Rather and others in New York City.

Like a fish unaware that it lived in water, this young man born into a blue-collar Democrat family in the South Bronx at first scarcely noticed the liberal bias permeating CBS and other national media. "I had never voted for a Republican candidate for president in my entire life!" writes Goldberg. In 1972, the year he began working for CBS, Goldberg. like 80 percent of national reporters. voted for George McGovern while Richard Nixon swept 49 states.

But gradually his second eye began to open, and Goldberg started to recognize how out of step the media elite was with the rest of America. One New York journalist expressed surprise at McGovern's defeat, declaring seriously that nobody she knew had voted for Nixon.

Goldberg began to see a tilt in the reporting around him. Why, he wondered, were conservatives labeled when interviewed in news stories, but liberals and Leftists were not? Why was it okay for NBC "Today" co-host Katie Couric (now reportedly about to become second in income only to Oprah as a daily female television star, to be paid $13 million or more per year) to suggest that a man who abandoned his would-be bride at the altar should be castrated, but if a male reporter suggested comparable mutilation of a woman he would be fired instantly for such insensitivity and Political Incorrectness?

After many years of privately and unsuccessfully urging more even-handed reporting to higher-ups at CBS, in 1996 Goldberg watched a CBS story. In it his fellow reporter Eric Engberg casually informed the huge CBS audience that GOP Presidential candidate Steve Forbes' flat tax proposal was one of his "wackier" ideas, and described it with slanted labels such as "scheme" and "elixir."

Goldberg then took a small step, but one that changed his life. He dashed off an Op-Ed piece for the Wall Street Journal (reprinted in this book) analyzing how "Mr. Engberg's report set new standards for bias." He asked: "Can you imagine, in your wildest dreams, a network news reporter calling Hillary Clinton's health care plan ?'wacky?'"

Engberg's story also interviewed only experts who agreed with his criticism. "Here's one of those dirty little secrets journalists are never supposed to reveal to the regular folks…." writes Goldberg. "A journalist can find an expert to say anything the reporter wants - anything! Just keep calling until one of the experts says what you need him to say…. It's how journalists sneak their own personal views into stories in the guise of objective news reporting…. It happens all the time."

If Goldberg expected gratitude from CBS, or a constructive dialogue about how to improve journalistic balance and fairness, he was mistaken. Instead, he instantly became Goldberg non grata, having broken the omerta, "code of silence," of what he now describes as a mafia-like authoritarian institution ruled not by the Don but by "the Dan" named Rather.

This liberal network famed for exposing the sins of others turned out to be neither liberal nor tolerant when one of its own reporters revealed its sins. Rather and others who had praised him as a fair, objective, skilled reporter only months earlier now tried to kill the messenger - smearing Goldberg as a "political activist," disgruntled employee, and worse. As discussed here in a recent column, Goldberg overnight found his career in tatters as he narrowly escaped firing but became permanently sidetracked and stymied at CBS.

The good news for us is that, since his departure from CBS last summer, Bernard Goldberg has turned his considerable journalistic talents to writing this book, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News. Jam-packed with rich factual details and insights that only an insider would know, this book is a whole arsenal of ammunition and evidence to help you liberate friends from the mind manipulation of ABC's Peter Jennings, NBC's Tom Brokaw, and the man who put the BS in CBS, Dan Rather. It belongs on the bookshelf of every news consumer in America.

Goldberg shares examples of bias he found most pervasive and perverse. The issue of homelessness seems to have been discovered by the elite media at the exact moment Ronald Reagan took office - and forgotten by them just as quickly on the day the man 89 percent of them voted for, Bill Clinton, took the oath as President. The homeless number as few as 230,000 but were conflated by the media to be five million - and projected by CBS's Charles Osgood to swell to 19 million by year 2000 unless major liberal measures were taken. The media depicted the homeless as "just like us," notes Goldberg, but in fact most are substance abusers and/or mentally ill. Many are on the streets because liberal lawyers demanded that they be released from mental institutions.

In a similar media deception, writes Goldberg, AIDS was reported as a disease threatening virtually every American, as in the title "The Killer Next Door" imposed on a Goldberg report on the CBS news show 48 Hours. In fact, only seven percent of AIDS patients are heterosexuals unconnected to needle-injected illegal drugs. The best-selling author of And The Band Played On Randy Shilts, prior to his own HIV-linked death, admitted privately to Goldberg that activists and the media deliberately exaggerated the risk to most Americans in order to elicit more sympathy and funding for AIDS treatment and research. As part of that deliberate distortion, Goldberg notes, national reporters in a spirit of Political Correctness almost never asked AIDS victims what behavior led to their infection. (Reporters never showed such reluctance in asking cancer victims if smoking evil corporate tobacco had caused their disease.)

Goldberg reveals how political correctness at CBS required one reporter to change his description of a "black man" to "African-American," even though the man in question was not American at all but Jamaican. (Another excellent source on this media bias is Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism [Encounter Books, 2001] by the Manhattan Institute's William McGowan.) We learn that for all their supposed racial liberalism, during Rating Sweeps, when audience size matters most, the Big Three networks do news stories almost exclusively about whites. The folks behind USA Today and many local newspapers, Gannett, by contrast require a cookie-cutter quota for racial minorities in almost every story - which, as Goldberg notes, caused great problems when one Gannett paper tried to do an article on Hanukkah cooking.

The media bias favoring feminism manifests in several ways, according to Goldberg. Leftist groups such as NOW are tapped by elite reporters to speak for all women, while larger conservative women's groups are ignored. Women are generally depicted as either victims or on the right side in social and family matters, while even men who prove they did not father children are branded "deadbeat dads" and expected to pay child support. (Male bashing and belittling is routinely done in reporting and commentary.) And in what he calls "the most important story you never saw on TV," Goldberg notes how evidence that daycare damages both the physical and mental health of children gets discredited or suppressed by journalistic bias - usually by female reporters who see this as implicit criticism of working mothers and therefore an attack upon themselves.

This book is immensely valuable in the fight for honest news, but like a fine meal without just desserts, it will leave ardent foes of the Leftist media hungering for more.

One reason is that, as hard as Goldberg hits in this book, we are left with a sense that the author is pulling his punches. He still works in broadcasting, at HBO's Real Sports hosted by Bryant Gumbel (also co-host of CBS's Early Show). He insists on telling us that even his nemesis Dan Rather, who emerges as someone bordering on mental illness in Goldberg's descriptions, is really a split personality - half of which is nice. Almost everybody he criticizes he also says something nice about. Perhaps Goldberg wants to be fastidious, or wants to avoid the smear accusation that he has become a right-wing "political activist."

Goldberg asserts that the media elite do not conspire in their liberalism….or even think of themselves as liberals. They merely live in very liberal, conformist subcultures - New York City, Washington, D.C. - where a smugly self-righteous Leftist worldview is simply the "norm," the moderate or "centrist" position, beyond question or debate.

(And speaking of norm, among the many tasty tidbits in this book is that Newsweek Assistant Managing Editor and Bobby Kennedy biographer-worshipper Evan Thomas is the grandson of six-time Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas.)

The political right, Goldberg believes, is not regarded as a rival ideology worthy of debate by Dan and Tom and Peter. They see the Right as merely "wrong" or "incorrect" or unacceptably inhumane - a position that no educated or civilized person could possibly hold. (This is one reason Goldberg so often heard CBS colleagues behind closed doors refer to the majority of Americans as "white trash" and bigoted. He also heard some link "anti-government" sentiments with dangerous, terrorist-like thinking.)

Goldberg also argues that elite journalists are not committed ideological Leftists but followers of style, celebrity, and fashionably-liberal poses. Thus Dan Rather calls Bill Clinton "honest" and the New York Times Editorial Page "Middle of the Road." Thus when Dan Rather "practically kissed Fidel Castro in front of the whole evening news staff when the dictator showed up at CBS News studios on West 57th Street in the fall of 1995," and Dan and Fidel were "smiling, laughing, bantering, looking like old pals who hadn't seen each other in years," Goldberg believes that this was the elite's "Newzak" mentality embracing Castro as a movie star rather than the Communist mass murderer he is. It is style over substance. Or maybe now we know what the "C" in CBS really stands for.

But where on the political spectrum does Goldberg place himself? "I'm probably slightly to the right on some issues, a Neo-conservative," he said on my radio show. But in his book Goldberg describes himself, with qualifications, as pro-choice on abortion, against "sex discrimination," pro-affirmative action, and pro-welfare. "I'm a liberal the way liberals used to be," he writes. "My views these days are fairly mainstream…."

And he adds: "Does anyone think a ?'diverse' group of conservative journalists would give us the news straight? I sure as hell don't. They'd be just like the Left."

The power of the media elite's Big Lie, repeated over and over, is that it can hypnotize even a man as intelligent as Bernard Goldberg into believing he is "slightly to the right" when in fact he is slightly Left of Center. Has he noticed that a large fraction of Democrat officeholders pretend to be conservatives when seeking re-election? Did he notice Dan Rather's attendance at a Democratic Party fundraiser in Texas, for which Rather apologized only after being caught in the act, or followed this columnist's investigation of Dan Rather's twisted past?

Goldberg seems not to favor Right over Left so much as right over wrong. A healthy democracy requires a watchdog press, but if the media loses its credibility it cannot keep government honest. He sincerely wants to save the elitist media from its own arrogance, hubris, unfairness, and lack of perspective. He wants the media to see with both eyes, and for the American eagle to fly with both a right and left wing. He wants a media that looks and thinks like America, not like some foreign elite that has hijacked our airwaves.

In 1979-1980, he notes, the Big Three networks at dinnertime were watched by 75 percent of TV viewers. Today the Big Three's combined share of that audience has declined to 43 percent and continues to shrink. Part of the reason is competition from a variety of cable channels, talk radio, and the Internet.

But a large factor in the elite media's decline, Goldberg believes, is that Americans distrust the biased reporting they see at ABC, NBC, and CBS. We are voting with our feet and TV remote controls for more diverse, reliable information at places like the Fox News Channel and FrontPageMagazine.com.

If the establishment media refuse to reform their Leftist bias, then Goldberg wants intelligent viewers who crave a balanced diet of information to leave them.