This book wasn't what I expected. It is a well documented, incteful look at the news. I was surprised to discover that this book was written by a liberal! This book is a must read for anyone who watches the evening news.

It's clear that Mr. Goldberg is hurt by his personal and professional troubles with CBS and Dan Rather. It is made even clearer by the fact that he constantly brings it up over and over again throughout most of this book.

This "book", for being written by someone who is outraged over the media bias, is incredibly unprofessional, full of hyperbole, personal rants, and very little decorum. If Goldberg wants to convince us that the media has a liberal slant, he would be much better off keeping his own opinions to himself and write a centered book based on facts. BIAS feels like a personal vendetta against Rather, against CBS, and I suspect that Goldberg had some aspirations for greatness in his return to CBS, was denied, and, in turn, wrote this scathing book as revenge.

I'm going to risk the possibility of getting "not helpful" votes from people with a political axe to grind, but here goes. I am going to review "Bias" AS A BOOK, without taking any position about its message or its politics.

As a book, it is fairly mediocre. Much of the first few chapters consists primarily of the author patting himself on the back for standing up against his employers at CBS and his peers in the media. The spark for this tale is the publishing of a column, in the Wall Street Journal, in which Goldberg criticizes a CBS news feature as unprofessionally biased against the flat-tax proposal of then-candidate Forbes in the '96 election. Goldberg tells us his personal war story of going against the leftist grain in the mainstream media, and gets in plenty of digs at the people who he believes treated him unfairly during the aftermath of publishing his views.

He has a self-congratulatory tone (and a bit of a martyrdom complex) when recounting this episode. For some bizarre reason, he has even seen fit to include in the appendix a few letters written to him by average people telling him how daring and great he is for standing up against CBS and the leftist media. It all seems so ridiculous and pathetic... is he so desperate to reassure himself that he did the right thing that a letter from Joe Blow in Keokuk, Iowa is what he clings to? Why start out by projecting this sort of picture of yourself, don't you still need readers to follow you through another 150 pages?

The middle portion of the book is somewhat better. His basic argument is that the media tilts to the left not because of any conscious decision to embrace a bias, but rather because the people in the media don't realize they are leftists. Coming from the backgrounds they do, living in the cities they do, they are surrounded at all times by people who think it is the default "moderate" position to be in favor of gun control, in favor of abortion, in favor of affirmative action, in favor of social welfare spending, and to side with spotted owls against loggers. There's no great conspiracy, they're not being fed talking points from the Democratic National Committee, it's just their own unconsciously leftist viewpoints leaking through into their reporting and their choice of which stories to cover.

Goldberg supports this argument with some polling data, but most of his support is just a collection of personal anecdotes. Now that is perfectly fine in a book that bills itself on the cover as an insider's account of the media. Just don't make the mistake of thinking it's anything more than that.

The choice of some subject matter within the book is also questionable. Goldberg devotes an entire chapter to a restating of the arguments in "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS" by Michael Fumento. The tie-in with the larger subject of media bias is tenuous at best. The chapter feels like a toss-in to pad the page count.

As an "insider's account", it has its moments. Still, Goldberg's self-congratulatory tone infests the book from cover to cover. Can't he see that in many ways he is exactly the same as the book's "villian", Dan Rather, whom he portrays as (in his professional life) an egomaniacal monster? Let's suppose I agree with many of his arguments and with his general portrayal of the media as being populated with oblivioius leftists... does it follow that because I find THEIR elitist attitudes gag-inducing that I can somehow stomach HIS OWN self-important musings in opposition? No, it doesn't.

This is a thoroughly mediocre book. I'll give it a 3, if only because it's somewhat unique to see an insider in our nation's last "ol' boys club" tearing DOWN the Fourth Estate rather than just sucking up to the legends of the news industry.

Bernard Goldberg's "Bias" is a revealing look at the newspaper and television news industry. Goldberg, an industry insider for nearly thirty years before he wrote the op-ed that effectively ended his career at CBS News, tackles the topic of bias, specifically liberal bias, that is prevalent among the major networks and newspapers. Goldberg's op-ed, which ran in the Wall Street Journal on February 13, 1996, brings up the topic of bias in news, and specifically, that during a CBS newscast the week before, and correlates that bias to the continuing drop in viewers of the main network newscasts. Goldberg goes in depth about the media culture, and offers some startling observations. For example, the media elites are so absorbed in their own surroundings and with their own people, their liberal bias is so ingrained that they don't see it as a bias. Mr. CBS, Dan Rather, actually told Golberg he considered the New York Times a "middle of the road" newspaper. The best Rather quote of the book, however, is from the Tom Synder show a year before Goldberg's op-ed was published. Rather said "It's one of the great political myths, about press bias. Most reporters don't know if they're Republican or Democrat and vote every which way." Anyone who believes that needs to have their head examined. For example, 89% of journalists polled said they voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, an election in which Clinton received 43% of the overall vote. The numbers were similar for Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004.

There are a million ways the media can slant news stories, and Goldberg examines some that he witnessed firsthand. The subtle ways the media alters their news coverage is demonstrated in the chapter, How Bill Clinton cured Homelessness. Stories about the "rising" numbers of homeless were abundant during the Reagan and Bush Sr. years, then virtually disappeared during Clinton's two terms. But once George W. took office, they again started appearing. Also of interest is how the media will take for granted statistics that a liberal advocacy group will throw out and blindly repeat without challenge. And of course, the practice of labeling conservative spokesman as such in stories, but not doing the same for liberal and even left wing spokesman. Goldberg discusses how certain liberal groups will always get the benefit of the doubt concerning their views, while conservative groups will be constantly challenged and derided concerning theirs.

In my opinion, the reason for the vitriol aimed at Fox News from the mainstream media isn't because Fox News is as right wing as they suggest, it's because Fox News exposes the liberal slant of the mainstream media. I believe Fox is right of center, but not right-wing. I don't believe CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC are left-wing, but definitely left of center. By labeling Fox "right-wing", the MSM is able to deflect their liberal bias.

One of the most interesting things in Goldberg's book is when he recounts the treatment he received after writing the op-ed. The news media, which projects this image of enlightenment treated him as a pariah and absolutely refused to debate the points he brought up. Instead, they attacked his character, accusing him of being a political activist with a right-wing agenda. Bias, and in fact, liberal bias is the worst kept secret in the news media, and they knew they couldn't dispute Goldberg on the facts, so they turned to character assassination. They knew they couldn't dispute his credentials, hell, he was one of them, so they had to do their best to destroy his credibility.

Although it's been a few years since Goldberg's book came out, the points he makes are more relevant than ever. Rather's forged document scandal from 2004 and his continued denial that the documents were forged (yes, he still maintains they're real) isn't only an indictment of Rather, it's a commentary on the whole mainstream media. Whether you've thought much of bias in the media or not, read the book and see what you think.

When I was introduced to Goldberg at a conference a few years ago, the first words out of his mouth to me were (almost a direct quote), "See, I don't have horns and a tail." Other than my name and that I am a journalism/mass communication professor, he knew NOTHING about me, not even my politics or whether I had read his book. The man doth protest too much, me thinks. I have read his book, and there is nothing like a completely one-sided book complaining about the mass media being one-sided in the other direction. If all of the mass media companies (which includes book publishers) were one-sided in favor of liberals (other than Fox, National Review, Weekly Standard, etc.), Goldberg wouldn't have been able to get this book published, let alone advertised, reviewed, etc.