Editorial Review for "Bias"

Don’t Let the Facts Stand in the Way of a Good Story!(Editorial Review for Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News)

After twenty-eight years working for CBS, Bernard Goldberg decided that he no longer wanted to work for a news station he didn’t admire. Thus, he resigned and began work on his book Bias; a book in which he merely draws attention to the media for reporting from a leftist perspective, preventing the audience from receiving an objective, unbiased view of what really goes on in our world. As an “old-fashioned liberal,” as he calls himself, he does not attempt to gain conservative support for accusing liberals of bias. Rather, he would prefer liberal support for acknowledging this problem in hopes of changing the face of news. He bases his book on his personal experience as a former news anchor for CBS. Despite popular belief, he meant no harm in his book (or in his editorials) to his previous employees. His only hope was to point out an alarmingly, already well-known fact; that reporters, even if unintentionally, at news stations like CBS, NBC, and ABC report the news from their liberal viewpoint, inhibiting their audiences’s right to an accurate portrayal of our news.
It all started out with an opinion editorial Goldberg wrote for the Wall Street Journal. After a man named Eric Engberg (and a once close friend to Goldberg) discussed upcoming presidential candidate Steven Forbes’ flat tax proposal from a painfully, liberal view, attacking Forbes’ proposal by using “tendentious terms like ‘scheme’ and ‘elixir’” (Blowing the Whistle on CBS News, 1996) instead of just giving the straight facts, Goldberg wrote an op-ed in which he discreetly and politely discussed the bias that is so apparent in news stories such as Engberg’s. Goldberg mentioned in his book several times the crap he got from all of CBS and other news anchors for writing that article. Since then, his career at CBS went further and further down the drain until its eventual collapse. Goldberg makes several references of reporters like Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw, showing them in a not-so-flattering light as anti-conservative anchors who not only attack anyone who dares differ in opinion from them, but wh...

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...ourse, as Goldberg parallels, had this “nut” been black, Jewish, or gay, Russell would have been fired so fast had she used the same terminology.
Bias in the news is happening everywhere, and no one seems to care to change it, which is why Bernard Goldberg has written this book. While Rather, Jennings, and Brokaw and the rest of his former employees at CBS might think he is a traitor, Goldberg had no intention of “selling them out.” He did not want them fired; he did not even want them reprimanded. All he was hoping for when he wrote his editorials and this book was to shed some light on this problem that is constantly prevailing. And for that, Bernard Goldberg should be praised. He could have easily written his editorials anonymously, yet he chose to attach his name to them. Why? Because he did not fear what he knew would accrue from his actions. He was not selfish and he believed that if they were going to fire him for something so innocent (voicing an opinion that is so widely-shared), then he didn’t want to work for an industry like that anyways. And so he resigned and wrote this book; a book that “blew the whistle” on the true nature of our news.