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Posted on 04/11/2003 3:05:21 PM PDT by Remedy
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – Veteran CBS correspondent and best-selling author Bernard Goldberg predicts that the liberal media establishment will collapse much like the Berlin Wall.
Speaking at special NewsMax NewsMaker Forum on Thursday, Goldberg said that millions of Americans are voting with their feet and getting their news from alternative media including Fox News Channel, talk radio and Web sites such as NewsMax.com.
Goldberg explained that liberal media bias, despite an almost total blackout in Big Media about his book "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News," had created a tremendous market for it and helped make it a No. 1 New York Times best seller. (You can get an autographed copy of "Bias" from NewsMax – just click here.
Goldberg’s prediction of the coming collapse of the leftist media establishment came on the heels of news that FNC’s morning show "Fox & Friends," a cable program, actually beat CBS’s morning show, a broadcast TV program available to far more viewers. If Larry King Interviewed Hitler …
The journalist shared the humorous side of liberal media bias.
"If Hitler were a guest on the Larry King show, Larry would ask, ‘Did you get hit by jet lag coming in?’" Goldberg joked.
"Bernard Goldberg is a man of courage and vision," explained Christopher Ruddy, editor-in-chief of NewsMax, who hosted Goldberg with several hundred NewsMax readers in attendance.
Goldberg said that his boss at CBS, Dan Rather, told him he was "dead" for revealing Rather’s and CBS News’ leftward bias. 'Traitor'
Noting that other liberal media colleagues called him a "traitor" after his groundbreaking book was published, Goldberg observed: "These are guys who don’t call real traitors a traitor. Have you ever heard a liberal news media elite call anybody a traitor? They didn’t even call that kid from Marin County, California, who was fighting with the Taliban a traitor. But they called me a traitor."
The gutsy journalist explained that contrary to the opinion of some conservative critics, the media’s liberal bias is not the result of a conspiracy. 'Provincial' Elitists
"What happens," he said, "is arguably worse. The media elite fancy themselves sophisticated, worldly people, but they are very provincial.
"They live in a bubble. The bubble is basically Manhattan and Georgetown and Washington. They go to cocktail parties and dinner parties with their smart sophisticated liberal friends in these places.
"After a while they can spot a conservative 10,000 miles a way, through brick. But they honestly think their views aren’t liberal but simply reasonable. They think they’re moderate. They think they’re mainstream. They mostly think they’re civilized whether it’s about gay rights, abortion or feminism or any of the big important social issues of our time.
"They think their views are civilized and reasonable and moderate and mainstream because ‘all my friends think that way about it.’ Then they stack their newsrooms with other like-minded people, and a kind of invisible consensus forms so that they’re either hostile to any views they don’t share or they don’t even know these views exist. So that no matter how you feel – take gay rights, for example … I acknowledge that gay marriage is a controversial subject, but we’ve had thousands of years of religious thought on this subject – to not think it’s controversial is crazy.
"Well, they don’t think these things are controversial, and that’s liberal bias. It isn’t blatant. It isn’t about going easy on Democrats and tough on Republicans. These guys would run over their liberal grandmother if they thought it would do them some good. It’s about how they see the whole world. And they see the world living in this bubble."
Goldberg cited comically horrific examples of the view from the leftist media bubble:
The late film critic Pauline Kael’s reaction to Richard Nixon’s landslide victory over George McGovern: "I don’t know how Richard Nixon could have won. I don’t know anybody who voted for him."
"What kind of bubble did she live in?" an astounded Goldberg wondered.
Just a few weeks ago, when America was deeply divided on the wisdom of invading Iraq and millions of Americans were taking one side or another, Mary McGrory of the Washington Post wrote, "Of all the people I know, nobody is for the war in Iraq."
How, Goldberg asked, "could you be a columnist for the Washington Post and not know anybody – her word – who’s for a war in Iraq." If It’s Not on CBS, Did It Not Happen?
Goldberg said that he’d been on talk radio shows all across the U.S. and interviewed by media outlets all over the world, but the three major U.S. media outlets that would not have him on were ABC, NBC and CBS.
He noted that NBC did offer to put him on one show – on the condition that he appear with, of all people, the disreputable and far-left Michael Moore, with the moderate Goldberg supposedly representing the far right.
Other nuggets from his talk:
The left’s newest claim, that there is conservative bias because of the preponderance of talk radio shows with right-wing views, ignores the fact that talk radio is opinion, whereas network newscasts and newspaper articles are not supposed to be opinion. The success of talk radio is the public’s reaction to the overwhelming leftist bias of the mainstream media dispensed as news.
The rejection of the media establishment is a rejection of what liberalism has become in America. This, he said, is why people have consistently rejected liberal talk radio.
When Andy Rooney made the amazing admission on the Larry King show that Dan Rather is "transparently liberal," only one newspaper in the U.S. reported it: the Washington Times.
Goldberg said that though he had long been a liberal, he has moved has found himself moving more to the right. He asked the audience if they knew anyone who was a conservative but became a liberal. "It doesn’t happen that way," he noted.
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Reminds me of the old joke: if you are under 30 and you are a conservative, you have no heart; if you are over 30 and you are liberal, you have no brain.
While I hope this will happen, I will not bet the farm on it. There are a ton of left wingers out there who will support them. Of course, I hope I am wrong.
Dick Morris, explaining this week why liberals are wrong, used phrases like: "Disconnected from reality," and "Minds stuffed full of propaganda."
I agree.
The other part about it adds in September 11th. The Left just doesn't get how much the country returned to its inate roots after that event, and why.
The media has already begun the slow slide into oblivion. If they don't change, (and they won't) it'll be great to watch.
The 'net, working in hand with talk radio, is slowly changing this scenario as more and more ordinary people are starting to see "the rest of the story."
If the media doesn't like a story, they simply won't talk about it- or will mention it once, them forever dismiss attempts to bring it back up as "old news, we already covered that, nobody's interested in it anymore..."
One key to winning the info wars is simply getting people to be better informed and more skeptical of pre-digested news and opinion, and to give them tools for finding their own news, rather than passively absorbing it from the TV set.
"Dan Rather........YOU'RE NEXT!!!!!"
Not intending to nitpick, but I hate that quote. I understand what it's trying to say, but it's wrong. It doesn't explain the college students who started ProtestWarrior, or my eighteen year old, staunchly conservative college freshman son, either. And he's not alone, by any stretch. And he doesn't parrot his old man's views, either. ;>)
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