I'm curious as to why the left doesn't offer up someone to dispute what Rush says.  I imagine the Reagan administration figured they had nothing to lose and everything to gain by eliminating the Fairness Doctrine and so it appears they were right.  Who could blame them?  So now the right has Limbaugh and the left is free to counter at will.

Speaking of bias, I've compiled some interesting thoughts from Bernard Goldberg's book, Bias.  Before you dismiss it as nothing more than words of a disgruntled former employee and a right winger with an agenda, know this...Bernard states..."I grew up in a blue-collar, Democratic family in the South Bronx. We lived in a tenement that was old even back then.

My father, Sam, worked long hours at a factory where they put embroidery on fabrics, everything from tablecloths to dresses.  My mother, Sylvia, took care of things at home, mostly my two brothers and me.

My elementary school, P.S. 61, was on Charlotte Street, an old, rundown couple of blocks that (long after I was gone) caught the attention of both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Both had traipsed through the neighborhood, camera crews in tow, because, by the time they discovered it, Charlotte Street was widely seen as one of the most rundown slums in all of America, a national symbol of urban decay.

My parents had to cash in a small insurance policy to get me started in college, another public school, Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. At Rutgers, like most of us on campus in the 1960s, I was liberal on all the big issues. I was an especially big fan of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.

I thought then, and still do today, that Martin Luther King is one of the two or three greatest and most courageous Americans of the twentieth century.

I didn't vote for Reagan either time. But I did vote for McGovern twice.  Once in the Florida primary and again in the 1972 general election.

I'm pro-choice, with reservations, especially when it comes to minors. And I'm for gay rights, too.

Not exactly the credentials of some raging right-winger or even some country-club Republican.

By way of full disclosure, I admit I had a flirtation with conservatism in my younger days. When I was a little kid growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s, I was a die-hard Yankee fan, but I swear that's the closest I've ever come to openly supporting the military-industrial complex or anything so blatantly right-wing!"

The following are some Bernard Goldberg's points I put together which make the case for the type of liberal bias which is troublesome to people like myself.  The book of course goes into much greater detail.

"The bias I'm talking about, by the way, isn't so much political bias of the Democratic-versus-Republican sort. There is that, for sure, but know that reporters would tear down their own liberal grandmothers if they thought it would make them look tough and further their careers.

For me that isn't the real problem. The problem comes in the big social and cultural issues, where we often sound more like flacks for liberal causes than objective journalists.

Why were we doing the work of the homeless lobby by exaggerating the number of homeless people on the streets of America? And why were we portraying them as regular folks just like you and me when we all knew they were overwhelmingly alcoholics and drug addicts and schizophrenics?

Why were we doing PR for the AIDS lobby by spreading an epidemic of fear, telling our viewers about how AIDS was about to break out into mainstream heterosexual America, which simply was not true?

Why did we give so much time on the evening news to liberal feminist organizations, like NOW, and almost no time to conservative women who oppose abortion?

I always had expressed my concerns privately, like a good, if somewhat disgruntled, soldier. All I wanted was a discussion, someone to take these concerns seriously. But no one ever did.

They love diversity in the newsroom. That's what they say, anyway.  They love diversity of color, diversity of gender, diversity of sexual orientation. But God forbid someone in their diverse newsroom has a diverse view about how the news ought to be presented. When that happens, these champions of diversity quake in their boots and practically make in their pants.

In 1981, having worked out of CBS News bureaus in Atlanta and then San Francisco, I was named a national correspondent, which allowed me to cover bigger, more important stories anywhere in the country.  My new base was CBS News headquarters in New York, where I was assigned to the evening news and its brand-new anchor, Dan Rather, who had just replaced Walter Cronkite.

It was in New York that for the first time I started noticing things that made me feel uneasy.  I noticed that we pointedly identified conservatives as conservatives, for example, but for some crazy reason didn't bother to identify liberals as liberals.

Harry Smith, the cohost (at the time) of CBS This Morning, introduced a segment on sexual harassment saying: "... has anything really changed?  Just ahead we're going to ask noted law professor Catharine MacKinnon and conservative spokeswoman Phyllis Schlafly to talk about that."

It sounds innocent enough, but why is it that Phyllis Schlafly was identified as a conservative, but Catharine MacKinnon was not identified as a radical feminist or a far-left law professor or even as a plain old liberal? MacKinnon, after all, is at least as far to the left as Schlafly is to the right. Why was she simply a "noted law professor"? The clear implication was that Catharine MacKinnon is an objective, well respected observer and Phyllis Schlafly is a political partisan.

In fact, during the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, NBC News actually brought MacKinnon in as an "expert" to bring perspective to the hearings. MacKinnon is the feminist ideologue who had famously implied that all sexual intercourse is rape. This did not deter NBC News.  

This blindness, this failure to see liberals as anything but middle-of-the-road moderates, happens all the time on network television. The Christian Coalition is identified as a conservative organization, so far so good, but we don't identify the National Organization for Women (NOW) as a liberal organization, which it surely is.

Since conservative women like Phyllis Schlafly or conservative judges like Robert Bork have "unorthodox" views, illiberal views, we must make sure to identify them as conservatives so our audience won't think that they're objective-or worse, heaven forfend, that they're also sensible, reasonable, and rational.

Robert Bork is the "conservative-judge. But Laurence Tribe, who must have been on the CBS Evening News ten million times in the 1980s (and who during the contested presidential election in 2000 was a leading member of Team Gore, arguing the vice president's case before the U.S. Supreme Court), is identified simply as a "Harvard law professor." But Tribe is not simply a Harvard law professor. He's easily as liberal as Bork is conservative.

If we do a Hollywood story, it's not unusual to identify certain actors, like Tom Selleck or Bruce Willis, as conservatives. But Barbra Streisand or Rob Reiner, no matter how active they are in liberal Democratic politics, are just Barbra Streisand and Rob Reiner.  Rush Limbaugh is the conservative radio talk show host. But Rosie O'Donnell, who while hosting a fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton said Mayor Rudy Giuliani was New York's "village idiot," is not the liberal TV talk show host.

During the Clinton impeachment trial in 1999, as the senators signed their names in the oath book swearing they would be fair and impartial, Peter Jennings, who was anchoring ABC News's live coverage, made sure his audience knew which senators were conservative but uttered not a word about which ones were liberal.

In the world of the Jenningses and Brokaws and Rathers, conservatives are out of the mainstream and need to be identified. Liberals, on the other hand, are the mainstream and don't need to be identified.

I found out just how true that was during my last conversation with Dan, the one on the phone the day before the op-ed came out.  That I would write such treasonous material was bad enough in Dan's eyes, but that I picked the Wall Street Journal, such a conservative paper, annoyed him too, and he let me know it.  "What do you call the New York Times editorial page?" I asked him, since he had written op-eds for that paper.  "Middle of the road," he said without missing a beat.  "You don't think the New York Times has a liberal editorial page?" I asked him, not believing what I had just heard.  "No," he said, "middle of the road."

This is a newspaper that consistently editorializes in favor of affirmative action, of all sorts of abortion rights, of strict gun-control laws, and is against the death penalty The editorials are well written and well reasoned. But they do represent liberal points of view.  This is a newspaper that has endorsed for president Al Gore, Bill  Clinton twice, Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter twice, George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, and John Kennedy.  You would have to go back to Dwight Elsenhower to find the last time the New York Times came out in favor of anyone even vaguely resembling a conservative.

And Dan Rather calls its editorial page "middle of the road." This is the essence of the problem. To Dan Rather and to a lot of other powerful members of the chattering class, that which is right of center is conservative. That which is left of center is middle of the road.  No wonder they can't recognize their own bias."


Kevin g