The Money Bias

Is there a liberal media bias on television? That's what former CBS newsman Bernard Goldberg claims in his current bestseller, Bias. It's an assortment of personal stories, statistics and strained analysis, all of which doesn't add up, particularly when you put the book down and turn on the television. Goldberg's claims evaporate the moment you flip over to MSNBC, to Alan Keyes' new talk show, unconvincingly titled Alan Keyes Is Making Sense. Any news producer worth his or her salt carrying out a liberal political agenda would have locked this guy in an NBC broom closet before allowing him anywhere near a camera.

Keyes, who has twice run in Republican presidential primaries, each night unfurls a smorgasbord of ideological, far-right ideas. He's a lot smarter than Pat Robertson, and a lot more articulate than Jerry Falwell. But it's the same old rant.

Among other things, Keyes seems to want to establish a conservative theocracy in America. He invokes Christ's name in discussing public policy. Why shouldn't children be taught in schools to respect gays and lesbians? Because, according to Keyes, that would amount to approval of homosexuality, which is not in accordance with the teachings of Jesus Christ (who, by the way, said nary a word about homosexuals). It would infringe upon his religious freedom, not to mention?drum roll please?contributing to the decline of American culture.

Ho-hum. Unless he jazzes it up, Keyes' show will fall flat on its face, not because the supposed great liberal media conspiracy squashed it?they in fact gave him this platform?but because we've heard all of this before. It's Pat Buchanan's Crossfire redux. And if you're a diehard fan of this sort of hysteria there is always The 700 Club on the Christian Broadcasting Network, which can't be beat for sheer drama. (Lately, they've been burning things in a flaming pit.)

That gets at what is the real bias in television media: money. At this point, producers slap on anything if they think it'll bring in viewers. And if it doesn't work out, it hits the trash bin. The networks and cable channels seem desperate, as more channels are in development and competition becomes fierce. As on radio, conservative tv talk shows bring a loyal following. On any given night it's Bill O'Reilly and Chris Matthews drawing in the viewers. Now that Greta Van Susteren has joined Fox News, CNN is trying out conservative Laura Ingraham at Van Susteren's old post. Friends who work in news at the big three networks complain all the time about how difficult it is to get anything remotely challenging on, describing an entrenched pandering to the status quo. The biggest concern producers have, they tell me, is trying to figure out what the vast number of Americans in the mundane middle want to see and how they want it packaged.

So where are all the armies of leftist talk show hosts? The feminists? The gays? The blacks who, unlike Alan Keyes, are not right-wing extremists (and no, Oprah doesn't count as a political show)? Where are all the people that Bernard Goldberg appears to be talking about in Bias?

Actually, sometimes it's hard to know what Goldberg is saying in the book because, while he claims there is a liberal bias in the media, some of the things he points to are far from evidence of that. Neatly slotted between bitter attacks on his former boss Dan Rather, Goldberg seems to have consciously included a little something for everyone, perhaps so we all could read his book and say, Well, he makes some good points. What better way to cook up a bestseller? He charges that tv news programs don't focus on blacks because they're worried about ratings. He claims that Tom Brokaw and NBC news producers are ever mindful of their parent company, GE, and often censor themselves. I couldn't agree more, but that certainly doesn't sound like liberal bias to me.

For a certain conspiratorial fringe of the far-right crowd, Goldberg spends an entire chapter claiming a dark conspiracy in which gay activists and the media have been in collusion since the 80s to hype the AIDS epidemic. (Never mind that AIDS activists were at odds with much of the media from the beginning of the epidemic, protesting coverage again and again.) Curiously, Goldberg says he had conversations with And the Band Played On author Randy Shilts, and claims that the late Shilts agreed with him. He then hails Shilts as brilliant.

Bias is peppered with anecdotes about producers', editors' and reporters' personal beliefs, which Goldberg contends are politically liberal. That's probably true. But so what? Different fields attract different types of people. Most stock brokers are probably politically conservative. Most interior decorators are probably liberal. But most good stock brokers offer their services to a broad spectrum of investors, and most good interior decorators have a palette of choices for clients, including for those boring and stodgy conservative clients. (Or have Pat and Bill Buckley never had a gay, Upper East Side, Hillary-voting decorator?) Goldberg seems to be saying that because everyone who works in a flagmaking factory might be left-leaning, the flags don't in the end turn out patriotic. But a flag is a flag. And a sensational, ratings-driven media is a sensational, ratings-driven media.

In one particular anecdote that has received a lot of attention, Goldberg quotes an unnamed CBS staffer on a conference call labeling former Family Research Council head Gary Bauer "the little nut from the Christian group." Well, I don't doubt that there are nasty Barney Frank jokes at The Washington Times, too, or vicious nicknames for Hillary Clinton over at the New York Post?or even at CBS, for that matter. What counts is this: Has Gary Bauer gotten his mug on tv and put forth his agenda? You better believe it?nauseatingly so, and a lot more often than those of us left of center have. I can't recall the networks giving a talk-show tryout to a radical leftist in the past couple of years. And as long as they're trying out the radical rightists like Alan Keyes?even if they're calling him a nut behind his back?television media is not being dictated by some vast liberal conspiracy.

Sullivan, Born Again

"I should have seen it," John Moyers, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Washington, DC-based TomPaine.com says. He was talking about this column from two weeks ago, about Andrew Sullivan's "crusade" against New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Moyers says he will reprint that column on his website.

TomPaine.com is a nonprofit online watchdog journal that publishes biting and on-target articles exposing the sleazier players in media, business and politics. Last week, however, TomPaine.com ran an unfortunate ad on The New York Times op-ed page?an excerpt of an article that former George editor Richard Blow had written for the site, patting Sullivan on the back for criticizing pundits who took money from Enron. Blow?who proclaimed that "journalists shouldn't accept money from any outside sources"?appeared to be unaware that Sullivan himself has been on the take from a Big Tobacco/Bush promoter, a fact that had been revealed here days earlier.

"I endorse your efforts to get Andrew Sullivan to fess up about his own private funding," Moyers says. "I think it would have added a dimension to the issue [had we known about it] and I would have entered it into the ad if it was in the piece."Moyers explained that he had server problems all week and hadn't seen the column linked up on the web, and wasn't receiving his e-mail either.

Michelangelo Signorile can be reached at [www.signorile.com](http://www.signorile.com).