Posted on 07/06/2005 9:37:54 AM PDT by areafiftyone
Bernard Goldberg Interview, Part I: Liberalism's Damage
Here is the first part of the transcript for my interview with Bernard Goldberg. In this part of the conversation, Goldberg talks at length about his disenchantment with liberalism and his frustration at the revolution in the liberal approach since the days of John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey.
CQ: Thank you for being here. I’m a big fan of your previous book, Bias --
BG: Thank you.
CQ: One of my inspirations for becoming a blogger was the work you did in Bias, and I think that’s true of half the blogosphere, at least. That resonated, as you know, not just with the blogosphere but with a large portion of America that felt disenfranchised by the media at large. It seems that your new book speaks to that same constituency, but maybe on a broader basis. Is that your goal in writing this book?
BG: That’s exactly right. What Bias did, Ed, was to talk about a very specific part of our culture, a very specific institution that I felt was doing a lot of harm, and that was the big-time news media. This takes on a much bigger subject, and that’s the culture at large. Look, I think whether somebody is a Democrat or a Republican, or a liberal or a conservative, I think we can agree – I hope we can agree – that we’ve become a nastier, less civil, more selfish America than we ought to be. And there’s a tendency to believe that, “Well, these things just happen, it’s the natural evolution of the culture, nobody’s really at fault, it just happens.”
Well, that’s not true. People really are at fault. There are real people with real names, and what this book is about is those real people who, in my view, are doing real harm to our country, in various parts of the culture. I touch on the media; that’s only one very small part of this book, a very small part. We talk about the Hollywood blowhards –
CQ: Right.
BG: I’ll go into each of these specifically, but let me just get the overview. Hollywood blowhards, which is a liberal institution out there. Intellectual thugs – nobody will disagree that colleges are run by the left, and these are people who impose speech codes. What’s liberal about that?
CQ: Right, exactly.
BG: The TV people who put on shows in prime time who put on shows that – at eight o’clock at night, I don’t want to have sit in front of the TV with my kids … You know, I say kids, but my son is older now, but people don’t want to sit there with there kids and watch one cheap sex joke after another. I will tell you, Ed, that I’m not the Church Lady. I don’t care at all how people talk or what people do in their private lives. What this book is about is the public arena, the public square and what’s going on in that area of our lives. In terms of private stuff, people can say and do whatever they want, I don’t care. But this is the public arena, and I care very much about that, and I think a lot of Americans are just fed up with what’s going on.
CQ: One of the things you touch on, you mentioned about not making judgments, and right in your introduction you write about that tolerance has turned into an indiscriminate tolerance. People must tolerate everything or be considered, like you said, a prude.
BG: Or a square.
CQ: Right.
BG: I think that may be the single most important sentence in the book, to be honest with you. Over the years, we grew tolerant of all the right things. We grew tolerant of civil rights, we became more tolerant of women’s rights. We became tolerant of various kinds of rights, and it was a good thing that we did. But over the years, we became indiscriminately tolerant. We became tolerant of crap! To tell somebody, to make a comment about this crap is to be judgmental somehow. And somehow, being judgmental of crap has become a bad thing.
Let’s talk about the TV stuff in particular. As I said, this used to be called the Family Hour. Now, it’s one cheap sex joke after another. But if you complain about that, you’re a prude, or you’re a square. You know what? This is why I come down harder on liberals than I do on conservatives, because the Left has decided to look the other way. They don’t want to complain about this, because if they do, now they’re on the side of the morality police. Oh, they couldn’t possibly want to be on that side.
So they make believe this isn’t a big deal, but you know what? The very people who care the most about the environment, as they rightly should, suddenly believe that what we put out in the cultural environment doesn’t mean anything. Air pollution means something; it affects how we live. What we put out into the culture means something, too, because that affects how we live. It affects the kind of America we live in.
CQ: In the past, you’ve called yourself classically liberal in talking about liberals versus conservatives. Would you consider yourself more of a conservative now, in this political climate?
BG: Yeah, that’s a good question. The answer is yes, because liberals have made it really difficult for a lot of us to be liberals. What I said was that I was a liberal in the old-fashioned sense. I was a liberal the way Hubert Humphrey and John Kennedy were liberals. But I am not -- underline not -- a liberal the way Al Franken and Michael Moore are liberals. They have made it more and more difficult. I’ll tell you, I think most liberals in this country are decent people. They go to jobs, they work hard, they support their families, they care about their mother, their kids, their wives, their husbands – that’s not the issue.
The issue is the people who speak loudest for the liberals, the voice of Liberal America. They are the ones doing a lot of harm to this culture. They’re the ones who put out these shows in Hollywood that are so cutting edge and daring and all that, that offend – well, I don’t want to say who they offend. They do get an audience. The liberal community is the one putting out all these shows in Hollywood. Liberals are the ones running the college campuses where they have speech codes. Can you imagine if George Bush imposed speech codes, or if Congress imposed speech codes? Liberals rightly would be screaming bloody murder. But only a few brave souls on the Left have complained about speech codes on campus.
Liberals look the other way when it comes to gangster rap. Gangster rap – if you wanted to come up with something that would make young black men look like buffoons, you’d come up with gangster rap. You’d think the Ku Klux Klan came up with this stuff. And yet feminist liberals, or liberal feminists, are silent – and their liberal friends are by and large silent. Why? Because it’s a black art form. Because it’s a black art form, it’s off limits to criticism. This is a world in which women are “bitches” and “hos”, and feminists have gone deaf, dumb, and blind about it.
So the answer to your question is yeah, I’ve become more conservative. I consider myself more conservative than I do liberal, and it’s because liberals are betraying liberalism. I’ll tell you what, and this is really important. Even when I agree with liberals on this issue or that issue, I no longer want to be associated with them, because they’re elitist snobs. Again, these are the ones who speak for liberalism in America, the ones who speak the loudest. They’re liberal snobs, and I’m with Tom Wolfe, who recently said, “I want it registered that I’m not one of them.” I’m telling you, even when I agree with them on a particular issue, I don’t like being seen in that group any more. They’ve done that to me; I haven’t done that to them.
CQ: You mentioned gangster rap. One of the things I found remarkable about your book, and pretty courageous, is that you tackle race issues, not once, but several times, and really in very clear terms. Now, being that you’re a “rich white guy”, do you find that a bit dangerous? Did you worry about how that was going to be received?
BG: Race, as you know, is the one area where if you open your mouth, you take a chance. I don’t think you should open your mouth unless you have enough time to explain yourself. If you read the stuff I write about Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Julian Bond – let’s take those three – I write that stuff with sadness. I grew up during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. I grew up during that time. That was the most important moral issue of my lifetime. It was more important than Viet Nam – in term of domestic [politics], it’s the most important issue. With terrorism, it’s taken on a whole new light. But civil rights, equality, was the most important moral issue certainly of the 20th century. Martin Luther King was one of the great Americans in the history of our Republic. And who took over after that? Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, even my old friend from when I was a reporter in Atlanta with CBS, Julian Bond. And what did they turn this movement into, this great moral movement? They turned it into cheap partisan politics. I write about race with sadness.
CQ: One of the other things I found remarkable about your book is that the first fifty-four pages is the heart of your book, I think. I mean, that’s where you’ve built that. The list is almost like dessert –
BG: The list is fun, but the essays, I think, are pretty damned good.
CQ: Yes –
BG: If I do say so myself. [Laughter]
CQ: The essays are terrific. Would you agree that the essays are really the heart of the book?
BG: I think you summed it up very well. The essays talk about how this country has become nastier, less civil, and more selfish than it ought to be, and it takes on some awfully big areas of the culture. It takes on America bashers, it takes on TV, it takes on universities, it takes on feminists gone wild, it takes on race – it takes on all the big issues. The list is fun. As I say, there aren’t two people in America who are going to agree with every name on the list. I think that will provide a brief, fun read for the audience, but the essays – the first fifty-something pages – really, really come from the heart and talk about where this great country of ours has gone in recent years. It’s not a good thing, in many cases, not a good thing.
Bernard Goldberg Interview, Part II: Not Just The Famous
CQ: Did you follow some of the speculation in the blogosphere and the media as to who was going to be in your Top 10, Top 25?
BG: [Laughs] A little bit. You know, I’m laughing because I’ve geared myself up to hear people say, “What? How come you didn’t put Hillary on the list?” Things like that. Of course, it goes without saying that the people on the Left will say to me, “How come Bush isn’t on the list? How come Rush isn’t on the list?” So I’m going to let people have fun with the list. I give them the opportunity on the very last page to tell me who they thing should be on the list. Maybe there’ll be an update at some point, and their entries will make it into the next book.
CQ: Are you going to put a blog site up, or a web site up, where people can send their entries?
BG: Well, Ed, I will tell you – and I tell you this with a great deal of embarrassment – that I’m not great at the Web, you know what I mean? I’m still finding my way, but I do have a website. There’s a place for people to post their opinions about things, including this. I will tell you flat out, it’s not Captain’s Quarters, but I’m new at this, Ed! You gotta cut me some slack!
CQ: [Laughs] Absolutely! I’ll make sure we post a link to that. Bloggers are going to be interested to find out that Markos Moulitsas made it to #52. What blogs do you read? What blogs do you follow?
BG: As I say, I‘ve got several jobs that keep me busy. I go to yours, I go to Power Line, I go to Free Republic … You know, I don’t want to offend the people I don’t mention. It’s just that I’m not as hip to this stuff as I know I ought to be.
CQ: Maybe you have more of a life. Some of us could probably use more of a life and less of the blogs.
BG: [Laughs] I’m not saying that! I know that will offend too many people.
CQ: [Laughs] Well, I’ll say it and let them be offended at me instead. Now, you’ve worked on HBO Sports [Real Sports] for years and I’m a big fan of your work there.
BG: Thank you.
CQ: I noticed that not too many sports figures made this list. Do you find them less consequential in terms of their ability to screw up America?
BG: No. I’ll tell you why. When you have a hundred names, on one hand it’s not easy finding the right 100. On the other hand, you could come up with a thousand names. I figured that the ones really doing harm to our culture are the big cultural figures, the ones I mention in the book. Sports and religion are the two things in America that we really get passionate about. I think we get more passionate about those two things than we do about politics, frankly. So I knew I had to mention somebody in sports, and I mention somebody who, frankly, I like as a player. I like his work ethic; I like a lot about him. He was an example of somebody I wrote about with mixed feelings. I didn’t sit down and write this saying, “Oh, great! I’m going to make this guy look bad.”
A lot of times, I had mixed feelings about the people I wrote about. In this case, when a guy’s worried about how he’s going to make it on seven million a year, I think he represents something bigger than himself. I think almost everybody in the book represents something bigger than themselves. What the sports reference represents, bigger than just the person I mention, is that a greediness has entered sports. Once upon a time, sports is where we went to escape, to have a good time, where we went to get away from all the crap we have in the culture. Now you find it there. You have a huge fight, and what happens when the fan gets caught? He says, “Well, I’m the victim here. Why should I get thrown out unless all the players are thrown out?” You get fans yelling all kinds of stuff in arenas. If you take your kids, you have to listen to people saying, “He dropped the f***ing football!” What have we become? Sports had to be mentioned, but I didn’t want to overdo it.
As a matter of fact, here’s the real point. I could have come up with this guy, I could have come up with somebody on steroids, I could have come up with somebody who’s violent, I could have come up with five or six or ten guys from the world of sports. I used the one I picked to represent the biggest problem in sports, and that’s there’s a disconnect between the athlete and the fan in a way that there wasn’t not too many years ago. Not too many years ago, players had off-season jobs. Now they make so much money that they don’t need it – which is fine with me, I’m a capitalist – but then they complain that they’re only making seven million dollars? Come on.
CQ: I was looking at your top 10 and I found it really interesting. First off, one of the entries – at least a couple of the entries, people won’t be terribly familiar with.
BG: Exactly.
CQ: Jonathan Kozol, being one of them, I thought was a tremendous teaching moment in the book, ironically. And Pinch Sulzberger. I don’t want to give away too much of the Top 10 here, I want people to read the book, but it speaks to the fact that you took this very seriously. This isn’t a just some glib, Late Night Top 10 kind of list.
BG: Thanks for noticing that. That’s a very important point, one which I can’t make, but I hope you will. A lot of the names on the list, the readers will recognize, but there are quite a few who they don’t know, or I think most of them won’t know. These are people who work behind the curtain, they’re not in the limelight, but they’re pulling all kinds of strings and doing lots of harm to the culture. I think one of the more interesting things about the book is how people will be introduced to these culprits who they didn’t even know existed. I think that’s a really important point, and I thank you, they way you said that, that it’s not just some Late Night Top 10 List. Yeah, there are famous people on the list, because they are screwing up the country, but there are people the reader will not know who are causing a great deal of harm to our culture. We need to tell the truth, and I think that’s what this book does.
CQ: Given that two of your top ten involve the New York Times, what kind of review do you expect to get from the Gray Lady?
BG: None! I guarantee you, I guarantee you. Guarantee. Remember you’re never supposed to say ‘never’? I am telling you, they will never, ever, ever, never review this book.
CQ: That’s interesting. You think they’ll be able to get away without –
BG: I don’t have a doubt in the world about this. And you know what? I don’t want this to come off as smug or self-centered or anything, but this is a serious book. This is an important book. It’s a funny book, in a lot of parts – I hope you think it’s funny – but it’s an important book. And the New York Times won’t touch it, for two reasons. One is the obvious reason, because their publisher is way up there on the list, but also because I find that even though they treated Bias very well, I think that the book review section is probably the most biased part of the New York Times. They’ve done stuff over the years like giving books to people they know will trash them, things like that. So they won’t review it, and you know what, Ed? I’m not going to lose a lot of sleep over that.
CQ: So what projects are coming up next for you? As you said, you’re a very busy man, but what are you going to take on next?
BG: I’m not an author by temperament. I’m a TV news reporter by temperament. So I’m going to keep busy with HBO, and I’m going to keep busy with what people send me on this book to see if I need to put it all together someplace and have a readers edition. But I’m always keeping an eye out for things I find interesting in the culture, and maybe I’ll write an op-ed here and there, but another book is not on my to-do list right now. [Laughs]
CQ: Mr. Goldberg, I can’t thank you enough –
BG: Bernie, please.
CQ: Bernie, I can’t thank you enough for your time today. I really appreciate it.
I know that Goldberg calls himself a liberal but he's far more conservative than he realizes.
He's a democrat from the old days, when the party actually stood for something other than MoveOn.org......
Sounds like an excellent book. I definitely will buy it.
Hi Mr. Goldberg, glad to hear you come to FR. Great books on a crucial subject. Keep fighting the good fight!
Congressman Billybob
The deal is, he is just an honest guy. He may be right or wrong on any given issue, just like anyone else, but he strives to be honest. How rare is that these days?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.