Rating: 
Summary: Goldberg gets it right on the money!
Review: Twenty years ago I was a media insider. Oh, I didn't occupy nearly as lofty a territory as Bernard Goldberg or Dan Rather; I was an editor and news reader for an all-news radio station in a major metropolitan area (KDEN in Denver, to be precise.) I had hardly begun working there when friends and family began to ask what would become a recurring question: "Why is there such a liberal bias in the media?"
Like the more exalted media elites, I denied, at first, that there was any such bias. But eventually I came to realize that the newsroom was full of people who did not represent the American mainstream. Not one of us, for example, was a Republican or a conservative. None of us could stand Ronald Reagan, who, as I have since been told, was one of the most popular presidents in recent history. We all supported gun control and unlimited access to abortion. And, with one exception I will mention later, we were antagonistic to religion--ranging from the pretty reporter who was a flaming atheist, to the majority of us who were merely distainful of religion as being a crutch for the weak-minded. In a nation where the majority of the population supported Ronald Reagan, felt uneasy about unlimited abortion, and attended church, we were by any definition left-of-center -- BUT WE COULDN'T SEE IT!
I started to notice a slant in the way the news was written. We got perhaps 90% of our copy straight from the wire services in New York and Washington. Much was done with seemingly innocuous word choices: a liberal politician had a tax "plan"; a conservative had a tax "scheme". People who opposed abortion were never "pro-life", they were "anti-abortion forces" or, better yet, "those who oppose a woman's right to abortion." Yet, the other side were always "pro-choice", never "pro-abortion forces" and certainly not "those who oppose a baby's right to live." Only the "correct" side was allowed to use its self-chosen identifier.
At church--yes, I went to church. I was the only member of the newsroom who did--I started running into the same P-C nonsense. I was attending a church that was well to the left-of-center and so I didn't feel it was controversial to say I supported Gary Hart as a presidential candidate. To my surprise, I was told by several people that I had just made a racist, bigoted statement that was highly inappropriate at church, because by implication I was not supporting Jesse Jackson! It was this same congregation that I offended sometime later by calling it--get this--"liberal." This group of nominal Christians, who no longer believed in the authority of the Bible or the unique divinity of Christ, who said that there was no need for salvation or sanctification, and who were desperately hoping some gay person would join the church so they could demonstrate how "open and affirming" they were -- they started looking around nervously, hoping there was some "liberal" in the next pew that I was talking about, because everyone "knew" that this was no liberal church, no sir, this was an old-fashioned midwestern-style conservative congregation.
AND THEY HONESTLY BELIEVED IT!!
And that, says Bernard Goldberg, is the problem with network news today. There is no left-wing conspiracy to slant the news; there is just an inbred group of left-wing liberals who don't even know they're liberal, who report the news as they see it. Unfortunately, they are completely out of touch with reality, and everybody in America knows it--except the media elites.
Twenty years later, I finally understand. This is the answer to why there is such a liberal bias in the media. Thank you, Bernard Goldberg.
Rating:
Summary: Right on, Bernie!
Review: As a retired journalist with 34 years in the business, I can tell you what Bernie Goldberg says about the networks is true, to a great extent, in most newsrooms across the country. His style is a little too cute for my taste, but his perceptions are right on. When it comes to social issues, the American media is, for the most party, unconsciously liberal and operates on assumptions that most Americans don't share.
That said, we have the best media in the world. It just needs a healthy dose of self-examination.
Rating: 
Summary: Should be "Things that make me whine"
Review: At first, I liked the book. His points were interesting and just. Once I got to the last half of the book, I was so tired of his perspective change into whining. The chapter that was to include the largest missed story of all time had promise. The great missed story was mothers going to the workplace is the reason children are how they are today. If that is not biased, I do not know what is. He has a hard time backing his claims. He never shows any proof. Weak.
Rating: 
Summary: How powerful is Rather?
Review: Goldberg's idea that conservatives are labeled as conservatives more often than liberals are labeled as liberals has been studied and proven wrong. Laurence Tribe was a specific example from his book. The facts are that Tribe has appeared on the CBS Evening News just 9 times since 1993, almost always with a liberal label. Also who cares if Dan Rather is a Democrat? He is a news reader, and one who behaves in a more proffesional manner than MSNBC's Brian Williams. If Goldberg really cares so much about Bias then he should be angry about the press core treatment of Al Gore that cost Gore the election. You can hear the true story behind Love Story, Love Canal, inventing the internet, Willie Horton, and the fancy hotel among other things at Bob Sommerby's dailyhowler website. I saw Goldgberg acting friendly with Sean Hannity who reliably told those lies. Looks like the press's favorite new target is John Kerry. Sometimes in his book Goldberg sights examples of bias like preffering to do story's about white people. Thats bias but I wouldn't call it liberal bias.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting, entertaining, fails to show "Liberal BIAS"
Review: People Have praised GOLDBERG'S courage in writing this book. Most of it is not about BIAS in the news, but rather a personal assult on his former-employer Dan Rather. The book tries to show something that is not true, but people like to believe, the media is bias. The author is a demagouge for conservative ideolouges, and has nothing better to do with his time than write. I saw no proof whatsoever taht the media was Bias, and the author sounding more like a child whinning, than a reportert. It was however will written, so I would give it a 1.5. Alas, not an option.
Rating:
Summary: "Mea culpa. . . "
Review: Towards the end of his days with CBS, Bernard Goldberg -- who is liberal -- began having problems with the fact that his network, like the other major networks, favored liberal viewpoints over others. An editorial against Steve Forbes' suggested flat-tax, passing itself off as objective news, prompted him to object.And so his days with CBS were numbered. But Goldberg had the last word, and wrote this book, which is so glaringly accurate that many began writing Goldberg off as a conservative, and far-left author Eric Alterman wrote a diatribe against it. Goldberg is right. Deal with it.
Rating:
Summary: THIS BOOK IS TERRIBLE
Review: The title of this book should've been titled "WHY I HATE DAN RATHER AND EVERYONE ELSE IN THE PRESS". I couldn't wait to read this book but DO NOT waste your money. This is a book about a man who has personal problems with specific news correspondents and he's just venting in a book. He boohoos about how Dan Rather gets great treatment and such. All the personal attacks made it hard for me to believe that he is credible and intelligent. Instead, he sounded utterly hateful and childish. I got the feeling that he doesn't truly care about the biased media but the purpose of his book is to vent.
Rating:
Summary: Shoddy Reporting + Poor Writing = Unconvincing
Review: The premise of ex-CBS news producer, Bernard Goldberg's, "Bias," is that the news media is run by a bunch of liberals who are infecting allegedly dispassionate reporting with their leftist slant. It is a premise that he substantiates with great vigor in this book. However, almost any theory can be proven if argued with limited information: "God is dead"; "Faith is alive"; "Men are oppressed in the U.S."; "Women make $.75 on the dollar in comparison to men"; "African Americans attend college in smaller numbers than Caucasians"; "Quotas that favor Blacks are keeping whites out of universities." All of these arguments can be made, and proven in ways that seem to tell the indisputable truth - but only if half the facts are all that gets presented. And half the facts are exactly what Goldberg presents in "Bias." A newsroom insider for many years, who had done "a thousand stories for Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News," Goldberg says he finally began to notice in 1996 that network (and newspaper) coverage of current events was being unduly influenced by the predominantly Democratic and liberal members of the press - his peers. In response to another reporter's clearly prejudiced coverage of Steve Forbes' presidential campaign, "Bernie" wrote an op-ed for the (conservative) Wall Street Journal blasting the TV piece in particular, and the conspiracy of liberally slanted journalism in general. Yes, the Forbes item was clearly partisan and designed to ridicule the candidate. Goldberg was right about this. As a result of his WSJ editorial, Bernie was chastened by the CBS news staff led by anchor, Dan Rather. Bernie uses a large portion of his overall word count to disparage Dan Rather in this account. He calls him "The Dan," and likens him to fictional Mafia Don, Tony Soprano. While it is probably true that Dan Rather has an inordinate amount of power in the news business - as do all TV stars -- Bernie loses his ability to be objective in relation to Rather, and uses the book as a character hit piece. He refers repeatedly to "The Dan," as if this phrase were the cleverest joke he had ever heard, and like many other anecdotes and lame witticisms he inflicts upon the reader, it makes for tiresome reading. Getting demoted and eventually pushed out of CBS by "The Dan," left Bernie with some time on his hands to stew in his outraged juices and collect the kind of proof he believed would indict the news media. The Forbes piece was undoubtedly a fine starting place for making his argument, and Bernie builds on this cornerstone with several other subjects he believes were covered unfairly by the news. One of the issues that he takes up is the portrayal of homelessness in America. He writes that during the length of Ronald Reagan's presidency, the media aired endless stories about street people, in some kind of deluded liberal effort to blame the presence of beggars on the president. However, when Bill Clinton came into office, he claims, newspeople dropped the issue, as if all the vagrants had suddenly been housed by virtue of a Democrat appearing in the White House. Next, he goes on to illuminate his views on the coverage of touchy subjects such as childcare. Apparently studies show that children should be at home with their mothers, though the news media, he opines, full of working women and feminist husbands, will never tell the public about it for fear that their lifestyles would become suspect. In another chapter, he writes that the media created the myth of heterosexuals getting AIDS in great numbers. "Where were all these straight Americans with AIDS? I didn't know any," he remarks. Later Bernie admits that it is true that 40% of people with AIDS are heterosexuals, but that most of those were "shooting up." The disease is not, he declares, what the liberal, gay-loving, politically correct media liked to portray as, "The Killer Next Door." Undoubtedly, many of his points are well taken. Children probably do better with a parent at home to care for them. (The conservative Dr. Laura Schlessinger convincingly preaches this doctrine daily on her ABC radio talk show .) AIDS does infect more gay men than it does heterosexuals. Even homelessness did not end with the Clinton ascendancy. Are these examples enough reason to believe that the news media has been taken over by leftists? A quick perusal of Fox news, where the right-wing, pit-bull, Bill O'Reilly presides nightly, might dispel that belief. Listening to AM radio, and its plethora of Republican pontificators, led by Rush Limbaugh, would also cause one to question whether the media was in the hands of neo-Commies. As was stated before, Goldberg only presents half of the story in this poorly written, self-serving diatribe. The other half of the story might contain the information that most of the media he writes about is owned by conservative corporations that censor what news is presented. All one has to do is remember the last presidential election, where the news media used every opportunity to remind Americans how boring and taciturn Democratic candidate Al Gore was - rather than to explain his policies - to wonder just how liberal a slant there really is in mainstream news. By not examining both sides of any issue, Goldberg never makes a convincing, case for blanket liberal bias in the media. After reading this semi-literate book, it is surprising CBS news did not get rid of him years earlier for his flimsy grasp of storytelling -- if nothing else.
Rating: 
Summary: Bernie is much better live!
Review: I can't tell you how disappointed I am to be disappointed in this book. Goldberg's appearance on several talkshows in my area had interested me in it, because he came across as fair albeit unapologetic in his criticisms of liberal colleagues, with specific examples of news stories colored by their ideology. However, the book itself reads much more like an emotional vindictive against his former employer, CBS. It chronologizes events after Goldberg, still a CBS commentator, published an article in the Wall Street Journal critical of a "news" piece done on presidential candidate Steve Forbes. Predictably, such whistleblowing is not met with favor by the medium used to lauding whistleblowers of OTHER professions. Unfortunately, however, instead of the hoped-for further documentation of clear instances where evidence favoring a conservative view is squelched to make a news report more to the reporter's liking, Goldberg continues to relate his own (assuredly painful) experience. The chapter on liberal hate speech turns out to be examples of comments in an editorial context, not from a newsdesk where neutrality is called for.
What rescued the book from 2-stardom for me was Goldberg's argument that his former friends engage in coloring the news without vindictiveness, necessarily, but simply because everyone who surrounds them has the same views they do. Hence, they see the left as mainstream. It makes me feel a bit less paranoid to hear someone from "within" assure me that they're not just playing "how can we slant the news this time" backstage.
Rating:
Summary: COURAGEOUS AND RIGHT-ON!
Review: Finally, someone from within that "News-a-tainment" monolith has the courage to tell it like it is... Gunga-Dan and company are a bunch of rich lefties, blinded by their own limited brain cells. Check out another great, light-hearted read... Keshner's "COCKPIT CONFESSIONS OF AN AIRLINE PILOT," my vote for book of the year. My complements to both Messrs. Goldberg and Keshner, Oliver North
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