quote:
I Bitch-slap Bernie Goldberg

In January of 2003, I was asked to appear on the MSNBC show Donahue with Bernard Goldberg, the former CBS correspondent whose best seller, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How The Media Distorts the News, purports to take on the liberal media bias. Slander and Bias are the right's one-two punch against the effete lefty elite.

The Donahue Show was going to be taped live in front of a studio audience at Rockefeller Center in New York. I was in San Francisco making big money with one of my halarious and well received corporarte speeches, and I hate appearing on these shows via satellite. It puts you at a disadvantage. Still, I had read Bernie's book a few months earlier, and I had a few problems with it. So I said yes.

A couple of weeks after I did the show, i was stopped by a TV news producer (not from CBS) who said " Man, you really bitch-slapped Bernie Goldberg."
Yeah, I did. But I have to admit, I did it a little unfairly. I ambushed Bernie. With His own book.

I asked him about something from his chapter, "Liberal Hate Speech". (Coulteresque, huh?) In the chapter, he cites twelve examples of "liberal hate speech" from the past twelve years. Goldberg admits he got them from the Media Research Center, a right-wing media-watch group which sends out a newsletter chock-full of "outrageous" quotes from the liberal media. Now considering the hundreds of thousands of hours of mainstream media coverage over that period, you'd thik Goldberg would have some pretty choice examples to pick from, right?

One of the twelve examples was a quote from John Chancellor, the late, revered NBC anchor and commentator. Here's how it appeared in Bias

It's short of soap, so there are lice in the hospitals. It's short of pantyhose, so womens legs go bare. It's short of snowsuits so babies stay home in winter. Sometimes it's short of cigarettes, so millions of people stop smoking involuntarily. It drives everyone crazy. The problem isn't communism. No one even talked about communism this week. The problem is shortages. - NBCNightly News commentator John Chancellor on the Soviet Union, August 21, 1991

After presenting the quote, Goldberg tears Chancellor a new one for " his absurd observation that the problems in the old Soviet Union wasn't communism but shortages".

Hmm. The quote was from August 1991. So on Donahue, i read the quote, then asked, " Do you know what happened that day in the Soviet Union, Bernie?"
He Froze. Then came back with a good one: "Why don't you tell me?"
I had learned how to handle that trick in the schoolyard back in Minnesota. "No, I said,"why don't you tell me?"
Clearly the man had no idea. I persisted, "What happened in the Soviet Union that day?"
Bernie went white. Finally, "Well, I don't know what happened that day."
So I told him. Let's go to the videotape:

Franken: That was the collapse of the coup, the hard-liner coup at the Parliment.
Goldberg: And?
Franken: And that was huge. Do you know that perestroika had been in effect for six years at that point? The point here is Bernie, you regurgitated a quote that you got from some right-wing media-watch group. And you did not care to look into the context of it. Listen to how Tom Brokaw opened that evenings news.

Good evening. Wednesday, August 21, 1991. This is a day for bold print in history to be remebered and savored as the day when the power of the people in the Soviet Union proved to be greater than the power of the gray and cold-blooded men who thought they could return that country to the darkness of state oppression."

Boy, it sounds like a real pro-communist bias on NBC, doesn't it? But you know what Bernie? You didn't even bother to find out what the context of John Chancellor--who, by the way, is dead, and couldn't defend himself. You had no interest in finding out the context of what he was saying.

I was talking into a camera in San Francisco, so I couldn't see Bernie. But when I watched the tape later, I have to admit I got a real kick out of watching Bernie sitting there silently stewing. He knew he looked like a fool, because I was right. He had thrown something in his book without checking it. Frankly, when I had first read the quote in Goldberg's book, I hadn't known the context either. I'm a comedian. But I had a sneaky suspicion that John Chancellor had never been a Stalinist.

So, I the comedian, bothered to look it up and get the transcript for the August 21,1991 NBC Nightly News broadcast. Brokaw had asked Chancellor about Gorbachev's next move. And what Chancellor was saying was that Gorbachev couldn't use communism as an excuse because, by that point, he had completely dismantled communism in the Soviet Union.

Alan Greenspan would have agreed with what Chancellor was saying. And yet Goldberg had accused John Chancellor of "liberal hate speech".
Now I'm on the satellite, asking Goldberg to respond. And he can't. So Phil turns to another guest, a right-wing radio talk show host named Jeff Whittaker, "Now Mr. Whittaker, you wanted to say briefly?"
As many examples as Al can pull out, I can pull out a lot of leads into the nightly news." (sounds like a familar retort to me- whomod ) What the hell does that mean? I was talking about Goldberg's book.
And that's when I started yelling from San Francisco, " I want to hear Bernie. This is about accountability."

But nothing from Bernie. And as Phil goes to commercial, I'm still shouting, Phil, why are you letting Bernie off?" When I watched the tape a few days later, I realized I may have appeared just a bit aggressive.
A little later in the show, Donahue took a caller.

Donahue: Billy from Tennesse. You waited. I thank you for your patience. What did you want to say?
caller: Phil, thank you. I think the main thing I wanted to say is I'm sad the conservatives you have on tonight have done a poor job of articulating our conservative argument, which I think is another bias of the press is that you always pick very smart, astute liberals, like Al Franken, who are very articulate, and then you have conservatives who scratch their heads and can't come back with something.
Donahue Oh, well...
(laughter)

Still later, Donahue turned to Bernie and said, "you know, i think you've been wounded tonight, kid."
He had been wounded. But unfortunately, because I was three thousand miles away, I wasn't able to shake hands with him after the show and take him out for a drink. If i'd been there, that's exactly what I would have done. And sipping my sake bomb, I would have explained to him what a travesty his book is.
It really should have been called Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How CBS didn't give him the Career He wanted. On 72 of the books 232 pages, Goldberg settles scores with is old boss Dan Rather. A representative sample: " If CBS News were a prison instead of a journalistic enterprise, three quarters of the producers and 100 percent of the vice presidents would be [Rather's] bitches."
Besides settling scores, Goldberg draws upon his twenty-eight years of broadcast journalism experience to relate a few telling anectdotes in which people in the newsroom said something liberal-sounding. Apparently at 12:36 P.M. on April 14, 1999 during a routine CBS Weekend News conference call, producer Roxanne Russell had the temerity to jokingly refer to Gary Bauer as a "little nut from the Christian group" (Full disclosure--Gary's a freind of mine, is small, a christian, and not a nut.) That was unfair. Thank God CBS didn't broadcast the conference call bacause that would have been very biased.
I'll admit that, from among the hundreds of thousands of hours of broadcast news over three decades, Bernie is able to cobble together a few instances of liberally slanted reporting. But even when Goldberg seems to have a point, it still feels just the teensiest bit selective. It's like accusing a library of having a murder mystery bias after only going to the murder mystery shelf. They're all murder mysteries!
Worse, most of his examples are as well researched as the John Chancellor quote.
Why Bernie asks, if CBS identifies the Heritage Foundation as a "conservative" think tank, does it not identify the Brookings institution as a "liberal" think tank?
I don't know. Bias? Or could it be because the Heritage Foundation's website says their mission is to "promote conservative public policies" while the Brookings website says it's committed to "independent, factual and nonpartisan research"?
Why, Bernie wants to know, is Phyllis Schafly always labeled as a "conservative"? Maybe because the official biography on her Eagle Forum website calls her a "national leader of the conservative movement."
Why Bernie asks on page 57, is Rush Limbaugh referred to as a "conserevative" talk show host, but Rosie O'Donell is not always labelled a "liberal" talk show host? At first, I thought that one was a misfire. Rush spends three hours a day delivering his patented brand of right-wing folderol. But when I remebered a Rosie show where she interviewed Haley Joel Osment. The kid was supposed to be promoting The Sixth Sense, but he just wouldn't shut up about the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Bernie has a chapter called "The Most Important Story you Never Saw on TV". It's about latchkey kids and working moms. And it is an important story. But if you haven't seen it on TV, it's because you haven't been watching CNN (11 stories), CBS (11),NBC (3), or ABC (10). When I see something only thirty-five times, i know the liberal media is trying to keep a lid on it.

You know, if there's one thing I associate with liberalism, it's anti-semitism. And what else could explain the shocking media cover-up of the fact that many Arabs dislike Isreal? Goldberg has the goods on this one. His smoking gun:" I learned much more about the atmosphere that breeds suicide bombers from one short article in Commentary Magazine than I have from watching twenty years of network television news." The Commentary article discusses a hit song in Cairo, Damascus, and the West Bank, entitled " I hate Isreal".
"Why didn't I know this?" Bernie writes indignantly. A computer check soon answered my question. On television only CNN reported the " I hate Isreal " story. On radio, NPR did a peice. So did The Christian Science Monitor and The Chicago Tribune. The Los Angeles Times ran a short news Wire service story.
So in other words, except for CNN, NPR, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and the wire services, not one of the liberal media outlets let us know about this important story-not FOX, not the Wall Street Journal, not the Washington Times, not even the National Review? Where are you, William F. Buckley Jr., you liberal anti-semite? (Actually, a Nexis search reveals that the story was also mentioned in the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Sun Times, Buffalo News, Miwaulkee Journal Sentinel, Pittsburg Post Gazette, Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, etc. But still, William Buckley's silence on 'I hate Isreal' speaks volumes)

As I said, one of Bias's biggest problems is selectivity. The book came out in December 2001. Now maybe Bernie doesn't follow politics, but there was a big election the previous year. looking at the coverage of a presidential election might be a good way to test theories of media bias, don't you think? Say the media was liberal. Which canidate would it be nicer to? The Republican George W. Bush or the Democrat, Albert Gore?
There's not one word in Bias about the 2000 Presidential election, in my next chapter, I wil ltry to fill in this gaping hole with a scientific analysys of just how liberal--or, perhaps, how conservative--that coverage was.

You know, one of the joys of appearing on TV is going through the e-mail you get when you bitch-slap a Bernie Goldberg or a Bill O'Reily. And boy, I got a lot of great e-mail from that Donahue appearance. Most of the comments were of the "way to get him" or " i liked your tie" variety, but quite a few were, shall we say, slightly negative.
One of my favorites:

Saw you on Donahue with your liberal shit. Blow it out your ass dickhead

I've composed a standard response to e-mail like that:

Thank you for your kind e-mail regarding my appearance on Donahue. As you can imagine, I've received so many poisitive responses that I cannot possibly answer them all personally. But once again, thank you for your kind remarks.

The idea is to frustrate them. It's especially gratifying when they respond to my response. Like the "blow-it-out-your-ass" guy did:

Hey asshole. I know you read my e-mail because you mentioned Donahue. Blow me.

So I e-mailed him back again.

Thank you for your kind e-mail regarding my appearance on Donahue. As you can imagine, I've received so many poisitive responses that I cannot possibly answer them all personally. But once again, thank you for your kind remarks.

Sure enough, a few hours later, another e-mail from my new freind.

Franken, you're a joke

So I e-mailed him back:

Thank you for your kind e-mail regarding my appearance on Donahue. As you can imagine, I've received so many poisitive responses that I cannot possibly answer them all personally. But once again, thank you for your kind remarks.

Unfortunately, that was the last of our little correspondense.

From chapter 6 of Al Franken's book "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

-

"

Hopefully, this book is next on your list after you're done gleaning insight from "Bias". After all, It would be the kind of balanced reading list I'd expect from someone who voted for the Green party. Sorry though, but that one is a bit hard to swallow considering the
Greens are slightly to the left of Timothy Leary. And not one post or opinion i've ever read would lead me to picture you voting Green.

By the by, I wouldn't be content unless G-Man appears soon to sidestep the actual points and FACTS brought up by Franken and instead attack Franken and Donahue for being part of the "liberal" conspiracy and then crack wise about how this proves nothing and that if that's the best the left can muster then blah blah blah blah... ad naseum.

Darknight>> As you can imagine, i try to raise awareness of news that most of my peers are completely oblivious to. I try to present the facts and let people think for themselves afterwards, although sometimes it just gets tedious when some of the dimmer bulbs don't even know who the
Attorney General is or even what an Attorney General is. So in circumstances like that when they ask me "what are we?" I simply say "Democrats" and move on. [wink] For most people though, i try to get them out to vote on Tuesday by trying to make it into something that is actually "cool" to do and try to explain the issues and the stakes involved. You'd be surprised at the amount of people who don't vote because they think it doesn't matter or that voting is 'dorky'. That's why you get this vocal minority deciding the fate of women's bodies, minority opportunity, and of gays. I've written a few letters to columnists and to the letters page of the Times in the past as well. I've been in one protest march and I hope to help out if the Clark/Dean or even Kerrey (if worse comes to worse) ticket comes to fruition. Otherwise it'll just be pure Bush derailment.

I would heavily recommend Franken's book. He does a lot to dispel some of the common myths being perpetuated by the extreme right such as Clinton not doing anything about terrorism while Bush actually is the one who started the wheels in motion with an actual timelines and quotes from both sides of the fence (he uses a lot of sources such as TIME, that i've mentioned before), he dispels some of the attacks on Gore inventing the internet and being a habitual liar buy presenting those stories' origins and the actual facts behind them. You're being duped hardcore by some pretty damn nasty people on the right, folks. Even I beleived some of those Gore stories initially. He dissects "Treason" and other Lies and liars. Well worth the few bucks you'll spend. And finally, i would like to thank FOX and Bill O'Reily for bringing this book to the forefront with their publicity. Thanks guys! [biiiig grin] By the way, contrary to what Bill O'Reily claimed often, Inside Edition never won a Peabody award. :lol: And yes, he DID in fact claim this despite what he now says. LIAR.