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The Media

June 1996

Blandness & objectivity

by James Bowman

Sad to say, we have not heard much from poor Bernard Goldberg since he made the faux pas of criticizing the fairness and objectivity of a colleague at CBS News back in February (see “The Press’s Naïve Cynicism,” in our March number). “The old argument that the networks and other media elites have a liberal bias is so blatantly true that it’s hardly worth discussing anymore,” wrote Goldberg in The Wall Street Journal—and he promptly disappeared from his regular commentary slot on the “CBS Evening News with Dan Rather.” He is now off Rather’s show permanently, but it is rumored within CBS that he may eventually turn up in some kind of role on the magazine show “48 Hours.”

The president of CBS News, Andrew Heyward, spoke of Goldberg’s words as “a real breach of our fundamental trust. Whatever his motives were, the net effect has been extremely damaging among his co ...

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James Bowman is the author of Honor: A History (Encounter Books) and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, also published by Encounter (2008)
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 14 June 1996, on page 51
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