A Lifelong Liberal Exposes Media Bias

Eurocentrists, mainstream conservatives and virtually all Americans with any semblance of common sense and fairness are all aware of the blatant double standard in America when it comes to race.  Specifically, media double standards on race are practically second nature.  Over the years, a number of organizations such as Accuracy in Media have sprouted in order to monitor and expose liberal bias.  Likewise, conservative broadcasters and pundits are constantly bellowing about media bias, and even former liberals like David Horowitz have written effectively about the racial transgressions of major media.
What makes Bernard Goldberg’s book, Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite, particularly astounding is not so much his revelations (though they are extremely interesting and important), but the unique perspective from which he comes -- who he is, where he worked, and his own personal ideology.

Bernard Goldberg worked as an on-air correspondent and producer for CBS News for nearly thirty years.  He has won seven Emmy Awards. His reputation in the business is impeccable.  Most significantly, to this day Goldberg describes himself as a liberal. He has never voted for a Republican for president. He is a supporter of gay rights. He sympathizes with feminism. He glories in the “civil rights” movement of the 1960’s and states he was “moved” by the speeches of Martin Luther King.  And he supports affirmative action, although he makes it clear that his support is only for the original concept – outreach to minorities, not discrimination against whites and racial quotas.

Goldberg actually restores some hope that there can be a liberal in a powerful and influential position who stills possesses a sense of honesty and fair play; a person who can betray open-mindedness, and who is willing to risk his career to point out the obvious.

Goldberg’s journey to writing Arrogance actually began with an op-ed piece he wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 1996, detailing liberal media bias.  Before the column hit, Goldberg phoned CBS colleague (and the most powerful man at the network) legendary news anchor Dan Rather to give him a heads up about what was about to appear in the morning paper.  As Goldberg worried about Rather’s reaction to the criticism, Rather assured him, “Bernie, you were my friend yesterday, you’re my friend today, and you’ll be my friend tomorrow.”  The article then came out and Rather has not spoken to him since.

Following the earthquake that ensued in the offices of big media after the column hit, Goldberg followed up with his 2002 bestseller, Bias, which exposed in much more detail the behind-the-scenes workings of major media outlets and how they distort the news.  While Bias touched on race, it was actually Goldberg’s sequel, Arrogance, that deals with race in a most profound and detailed manner.
“There are few forces on earth more powerful than white liberal guilt,” Goldberg writes. “It has no known limits. In the heart and minds of plain old regular liberals, it’s bad enough. But in the hands of journalists, white liberal guilt becomes a very dangerous force indeed.”

Goldberg asserts that, deep down, many of his colleagues suspect they’ve got it wrong about race, but cannot bring themselves to come clean. He explains why: “By hanging on to the old party line for dear life – and conveniently to see anyone with contrary views as ‘racially insensitive’ Neanderthals if not out-and-out racists – they get to continue to do what too many liberals enjoy doing best: bask in their own moral superiority.”

He points out that the very nature of bias can be detected in whether or not editors and journalists regard something as newsworthy.  He writes, “The American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), an organization that represents every major paper in the country, is downright obsessed with diversity and affirmative action, concepts the editors apparently don’t regard as even mildly controversial.” 

In other words, since all journalists engage in groupthink, it never occurs to them that there can be two sides to the issue. Affirmative action is not merely good, it is normal, and anyone who disagrees is on the fringe. But Goldberg points out that this love of diversity does not extend to diversity of ideas or viewpoints, but is only skin deep.

“How in the world,” he asks, “can a journalist report fairly on affirmative action and racial preferences after the organization for which that journalist works has already taken sides? And not merely taken sides, but declared only one position good and fair and moral? How can he or she even pretend to represent honestly the views of those millions and millions of decent Americans who do not think affirmative action is an open-and-shut moral case; who believe, to the contrary and with equal passion, that affirmative action is nothing more than a nicer way of saying ‘reverse discrimination’?”
Goldberg tells a story about a major controversy caused by the statements of Texas Law School Professor Lino Graglia, who essentially stated that the reason minorities did not do as well as whites in school was not because of racism but due to the fact that black and Hispanic families place a low priority on education.

As Goldberg tells it, a “mini-World War III” erupted on the campus and the CBS program Public Eye decided to do a story on it with Goldberg as the reporter.  “After it aired, a top producer on the program – white and very liberal – came up to me, shaking his head in disbelief over what he considered the incredibly backward things the professor had to say. ‘Can you believe this guy?’ he asked. The question was meant to be rhetorical – there was not a scintilla of doubt in his mind that I, like everyone else in the wide world of big-time journalism, shared his contempt for the professor.”
But Goldberg replied, “I could,” leaving the producer to walk away astonished, with a “shit-eating grin.”
Goldberg then concludes, “I had covered too many stories for CBS News in what we used to call ‘the ghetto,’ where that encouragement just didn’t exist, where kids were left to fend for themselves after school, where there wasn’t a book in the house. Of course, this was true in a lot of white households, too. Unfortunately, it was disproportionately true with minorities.”

In another instance, as a reporter for the CBS Evening News, Goldberg was setting up a story on a group of juvenile house thieves who were terrorizing a nice neighborhood in Orlando, Florida.  Before heading off to Orlando, his white liberal female producer asked him, “Are the juvenile delinquents black or white?”
“I don’t know,” Goldberg replied. “I didn’t bother to ask. Is that important?”
She replied, “They need to be white.”

It was clear to Goldberg that the piece would never air if the hoodlums weren’t white, so he called his contacts in Orlando and was told they were indeed white and the story was happily reported.
But people have no idea, Goldberg says, of how routinely the media deliberately fail to reveal the race of criminals because most criminals are black.  Even the race of “a rapist – who is still at large – for fear of offending blacks (in and out of the newsroom)” due to the fear of “feeding into racial stereotypes.”
“Never mind,” Goldberg writes, “that telling their readers everything they can about the suspect, including his race, might actually help find the monster preying on women. That’s not important enough, apparently – not in the hands of ‘deferential’ liberal newspeople.”

On the touchy matter of hate crimes (the most common ones, where blacks victimize whites), Goldberg again points out that media practice “good racial manners” and “bend over backwards to make the assault look like nothing more than a misunderstanding between the races.”
Goldberg relates the story of August 2002 when the Philadelphia Daily News ran a front-page story on fifteen suspects wanted for murder, complete with mug shots, all of whom were non-white.  “Before you could say, ‘Racist,’ the phones at the paper were ringing off the hook. The callers were angry, not because they claimed the story was false, but because of the impression it might leave.”

He then goes on to lament that, sure enough, rather than defend its story as accurate, the paper apologized. In what Goldberg described as “a classically mealy-mouthed mea culpa to readers”, the paper’s managing editor wrote, “The front-page photos from last Thursday sent the message to some readers that only black men commit murder… In addition, the stories didn’t address a key question: Why are there no white suspects on the loose? That was also a mistake.”

In response to this nonsense, a Philadelphia police official pointed out that white murderers were already locked up and blacks weren’t because of the lack of cooperation with police in the black community, a distrust that makes blacks let murderers roam amongst them rather than help the police catch them.
Goldberg writes, “If distrust of cops in the black community is really so pervasive that it outweighs even concerns about safety and security, that in itself would make a terrific story. What is the police response to that kind of distrust? To what extent is it legitimately the result of law-abiding black citizens’ deeply felt sense that cops hassle anyone who’s black, and how much of it is a product of decades of divisive antiwhite and anticop rhetoric put forth by black activists?
“Think it’ll ever be written?” Goldberg asks. “Don’t hold your breath.”

White journalists are just as cowardly when dealing with radical black journalists. One black reporter for the Los Angeles Times wrote in his memoir of a white female colleague that he wanted to “grab her by the throat and shake her like a rag doll” for a story suggestion he didn’t like. Another black at the Washington Post bragged publicly of how, as a youth, he found “fucking up white boys made us feel real good inside…” and “… take one of those white boys where I work and bang his head against a wall or stomp part of him in the ground…”

Goldberg asks, “Can anyone even begin to imagine a white reporter writing such words about a black colleague and living, professionally speaking, to tell about it?”
In the summer of 2002, child abductions seemed to be rampant and every parent’s worst nightmare was making news on a regular basis. In Philadelphia, a black child named Erica Pratt was kidnapped, thrown in the basement of an empty house, and tied up with duct tape.  Courageously, she chewed through the tape, kicked open the basement door, and escaped through a window, screaming until she was rescued.

This was a fantastic story, and since news organization had been pressured and criticized by black groups for seeming to focus on only white child abductees, the Erica Pratt case was the perfect opportunity for the media to make right.
Details, however, soon emerged that this was not a typical kidnapping like the others. Erica Pratt’s family was deeply involved in a drug ring and some family members had already been murdered. There was clearly a drug angle and the abductors were people involved with the family. It seems that moneys were owed and the kidnapping was in retaliation.  Erica Pratt’s family obviously was dysfunctional and criminal.
​
The police knew this and it was subsequently reported by Philadelphia newspapers.  But, Goldberg writes, the major networks refused to report on that part of the story.  “I had a whole catalog of examples where politically correct senior producers put concerns about race above their concerns about telling the truth. They were always worried about showing too many black criminals in jail even when the prison was loaded with black criminals. They were worried about showing a few black men looting stores after a hurricane, even though the looting was happening on a Caribbean island where just about everybody, including the cops who arrested them, was black. And now, with Erica Pratt, it was looking like they were going PC again.”

Goldberg only found out the truth about the Pratt case when he watched the O’Reilly Factor on Fox. For an article he wanted to write on the subject, Goldberg then called Jim Axelrod of CBS News, the reporter who had done the Pratt story, and asked why the drug angle was omitted. Axelrod would not comment. Goldberg e-mailed John Yang, the reporter for ABC News, asking the same question. Yang replied, “Before committing to do this, I‘d like to know what angle you’re pursuing.” When Goldberg informed him, Yang never replied.

Arrogance is an extremely valuable book, as any effort would be that would garner as much attention as this effort has.  Although he focuses on virtually all ideological media transgressions – feminism, the homeless, the military – it is on race that Goldberg has shown the most courage and insight. The shots that Goldberg takes at major news honchos has made him persona non grata in many powerful circles, but there is also a quiet circle of gratitude and support for him within the world of media. May he continue to expose the fecklessness and dishonesty of the American press.