Book Review: Bias

“Bernard Goldberg”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060520841/jksobservat-20/103-3604793-4877406 saw an item on the CBS evening news with Dan Rather about Steve Forbes. The news was presented by one of Rather’s reporters about Steve Forbes flat tax plan. Mr. Forbes was running as one of the candidates for the post of the Republican nominee for the President of United States. The piece was very critical of Mr. Forbes plan and the experts who expressed their views criticized the plan. According to Goldberg, this piece was biased, not objective and should not have been aired.
Goldberg wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal pointing out a liberal bias in the media. If Goldberg had been any other tax paying American, it would not have mattered. But he was one of Dan Rather’s reporters and that too for almost two decades. After this Goldberg became a non-entity in CBS. Dan Rather stopped talking to him (after saying, You were my friend and will remain my friend for ever), so did most of his colleagues and he was taken off the air.
The piece on Steve Forbes was not the one that triggered Goldberg. He had been watching the liberal slant of the media for many years and had complained to his bosses at CBS. Even though his bosses agreed with him in private, they refused to say that in public. Goldberg then tells us various stories and the angle with which the media cover them. One of them is the way how people are identified on television. Anyone from a conservative organization is identified as a conservative, but liberals are identified as just “experts” implying being liberal is normal.
The problem according to Goldberg is that producers enforce their liberal values on the story. It is not like they come in the morning and say we will slant all stories to the left today. According to Goldberg, it is something that comes naturally to them. But the same media which likes into poke into other people’s lives could not take it when someone did it to them. Dan Rather said he would never read that book. But I found this book very fascinating and worth reading if you are a person who gets his news from the American news channels.
After reading “this book”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060520841/jksobservat-20, I was thinking, it would be nice to write a book which looks at the bias with which the media here covers international news. (What international news ?) Rajiv Malhotra had an article on this issue titled CNN’s Pakistan’s Bias. It would be nice to hear what people from other countries think of the coverage they are getting in American media about their countries.