Bernard Goldberg, 28 years with the American TV network, CBS, explains why elitist news organisations like the BBC need help seeing their bias.
They don’t think that their positions on the most controversial issues of our time are liberal positions. They think they’re mainstream positions, because all their friends in the bubble think the same way as they do. They think everything to the right of center is conservative. Correct. And everything to the left of center is moderate and mainstream. That’s how crazy it is.And that’s why you can go up to these people and say, ‘Well, there’s a liberal bias.’ And they’ll say, ‘No there isn’t. And anybody who says there is, is a conservative ideologue and that’s the only reason they’re saying it.’ They don’t look at themselves because it’s as if you asked a fish what it’s like to be wet all day. And the fish says, ‘What do you mean wet? What’s wet?’ The fish has no concept of wet because he has no other frame of reference. Well, these people live in the same type of environment. And that’s why–that’s why fixing the problem themselves is so incredibly difficult.
Goldberg is interviewed on the CBS-fisking blog RatherBiased. Much of the interview features US news but one will have no difficulty seeing a familiar pattern. (What’s missing is the license fee.) Goldberg was largely frozen out by his former TV newsies after his book Bias was published a few years back. They closed ranks real quick-like. Even Larry King refused to have him on. Bias sold a gazillion copies anyway because it resonated with many Americans. His follow-up to this is Arrogance. Hmmm. I wonder what he’ll name the next one?
Why is the Telegraph shutting down it’s “Beebwatch” column? Too much pressure from Pravda-by-the-Thames?
In Bogdanovich’s film “Mask”, a boy tries to explain to a girl who was born blind what colours are, the idea or concept of colour. Finally, he tries out a kind of analogy: he gives her an ice cube or something and tells her “this is blue”; then makes her touch something hot and says “this is red”. Well, maybe something similar could be tried with the BBC folks. But, even as if, like the girl in the picture, they’d say in the end that now they get it, they still would be BBBlind.
Susan’s comments about Beebwatch:
I just think it was the change of editor – Charles Moore has recently vacated the editor’s chair, and Beebwatch was his baby. Shame though, it was a good article.
Yes, what a shame. Just when they were starting to get results. Sigh. . .
What a long interview. Pretty interesting, though. I wish there’d be more people like him.
Decades ago, American reporters were working-class loners, who truly saw themselves as separate from the ruling elite and the intellectual snobs.
Now that reporters (oops, “journalists” they call themselves) for the big TV stations and newspaperscome from middle and upper-class homes. Most have graduated from ivy league or other top universities. No one’s lying when they describe the utter tyranny of the left over these universities.
From the time these reporters were college freshman, they have absorbed a bias against traditional American beliefs (like RELIGION and patriotism). Herdlike, they graze in the same DC and NYC bars and galas, read the same books, have the same friends and echo the same secular-socialist ideas.
Then these “journalists” rage against the common man, telling us that they are on the side of the oppressed, the truth, the community of nations. And that we are impinging upon their freedom of press and speech if we disagree. But with internet, cable TV and talk radio, conservative Americans are breaking through this monopoly and the media’s charades.