Bernard Goldberg



Bernard "Bernie" Richard Goldberg is a right-wing political commentator who has previously worked for both CBS and Fox News. He specifically describes himself as a conservative with libertarian leanings, saying in 2020, "I see myself as a conservative with live and let live principles … a conservative libertarian I guess." He has also called himself "an old-fashioned liberal. . . like John F. Kennedy and . . . like Hubert Humphrey."

The former CBS employee who hates CBS
Goldberg worked for CBS for twenty eight years, from 1972 until 2000. While there, Goldberg slowly began to become one of the leading critics of the "left-wing bias" at the network he worked at, with Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) specifically citing a 1996 article from The Wall Street Journal as the first time he dipped his toes into this pool. The article specifically discussed a segment CBS ran on Steve Forbes's flat tax, and Goldberg basically argues the network failed to properly disclose the expert they were using to argue against it as "liberal" and failed to give the other side a fair shake. However, the person he argued that CBS had failed to disclose as a liberal was William Gale, an economic advisor to George H.W. Bush and an employee for the rather centrist Brookings Institute. Furthermore, Goldberg left out who else was on that segment criticizing the flat tax, among them then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Goldberg's first book, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News (a book which won the indirect endorsement of George W. Bush ), is largely made up of such accusations, even repeating the flat tax story. Here, Goldberg is outraged at the use of phrases like "scheme" and "elixir" to describe the plan. "What the hell kind of language is that, I wondered?" If Goldberg thinks that's harsh, he should read a New York Times article from January 1996 which said of the flat tax, "it appears to have been drafted on the back of a menu, after a bibulous evening with the boys down at the yacht basin." would mean "the Federal budget would be thrown scores of billions of dollars deeper into deficit, and lounge lizards in Palm Beach pay a lower tax rate than steelworkers in Youngstown," and "would be laughed out of Congress." Said article, was written not by a liberal but by then-Republican Presidential Candidate Pat Buchanan.

Yeah, that's another issue with Bernard's original example, although the flat tax is typically associated with right-wing politics, that is by no means an absolute. (It certainly isn't just a "conservative idea" as Goldberg puts it. ) Democrat Jerry Brown ran on a flat tax rate of thirteen percent during his 1992 Presidential Campaign. Brown even scored the endorsement of Christopher Hitchens, Gore Vidal, and Michael Moore during that run. You know, the guy who Goldberg later called the number one person screwing up America.

This also means Goldberg did have a basis for comparison when he wrote "There is absolutely no way — not one chance in a million — that Engberg or Rather would have aired a flat-tax story with that same contemptuous tone if Ted Kennedy or Hillary Clinton had come up with the idea." However, actually looking through the archives of FAIR from the time, the media was equally as biased against Brown's plan as it was Forbes's, with them talking to groups that they never talked to during the Reagan years to campaign against it and refusing to call Bill Clinton's tax plan regressive in spite of it being about the same as Brown's plan in that regard. ("Not even David Duke provoked this kind of reaction," FAIR wrote regarding the negative coverage Brown was getting. )

In his book, Goldberg complains that "Engberg interviewed three different tax experts. Every single one of them opposed the flat tax. . . Where was the fairness and balance . . . Wasn't there any expert--even one--in the entire United States who thought the flat tax might work?" There is no doubt many economists support the flat tax, however, to therefore say their views should be represented just on the basis that they're experts is absurd. Remember, "expert" is a rather wide field and it has long been noted that somebody being an expert does not stop you from holding ridiculous beliefs. In fact, many have commented that experts are more likely to believe insane things than the average person. ("This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them," wrote Bertrand Russell. ) To put this another way: Richard Wolff has a PhD in Economics from Yale University, however, regardless of your opinion on Wolff and his ideology, most would agree his status as an expert doesn't mean CBS should host a debate on the topic of Marxism.

And the cherry on top: Although Bernard will get onto the CBS piece for using the word "wacky" to describe Forbes's idea, he has no issue with slipping in some bias of his own by, one paragraph later, hyperbolically calling America's tax code "ten-trillion-pages."

The Boy Who Cried Media Bias
Listen, Bill, this isn't that much different from how the Ku Klux Klan operates.

Looking through his books on the topic of "media bias," many of his examples can be broken down in a manner similar to the one above. For example, one of Goldberg's biggest points is about the labeling of people with certain political views, specifically that this happens more often to conservatives than liberals. "I noticed that we pointedly identified conservatives as conservatives, for example, but for some crazy reason didn't bother to identify liberals as liberals," Goldberg writes. Goldberg notes that nobody ever labels Catharine MacKinnon as "a radical feminist or a far-left law professor or even a plain old liberal" in spite of the fact that she's "the feminist ideologue who had famously implied that all sexual intercourse is rape." Of course, the fact MacKinnon never said that doesn't actually deter Goldberg from making this claim.

For that matter, this idea that conservatives are labeled but liberals aren't also isn't true. When FAIR looked into this, they found out that the media was actually more likely to label liberals as liberals as over labelling conservatives as conservative.

Did Those Women and Black People Make Media Bias?
During a 2007 episode of The O'Reilly Factor, Bernie said what he felt was the reason the media became so damn bias: Black people and women!

Bernie gets bitch-slapped
In January 2003, Al Franken appeared on the MSNBC show The Phil Donahue Show alongside, among other people, Goldberg. Franken specifically wanted to ask Goldberg about one quote he used to prove liberal bias in media, that being this one from John Chancellor:

Here is Franken describing the encounter:

Franken explained the full context of the quote that Goldberg used below, by saying:

"Man, you really bitch-slapped Bernard Goldberg," said one TV producer to Franken after the encounter.

For the record, the notion that the Soviet Union had moved away from anything that could be called communism was not a controversial opinion among the west at the time. The quote Goldberg used was from 1991, the year before Ronald Reagan's autobiography An American Life was published, where Reagan said the following:

Nobody would claim this meant Reagan was a communist.

Bernard responds
How did Bernard respond to this? Well, in his 2005 book 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (and Al Franken is #37) Goldberg has a fictional conversation with Franken where Franken calls him a liar and an idiot.

That time one of his books inspired a terrorist
In 2008, a man named Jim Adkisson killed two members of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church and injured several others. In his manifesto, he wrote, "This was a symbolic killing. Who [sic] I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate, and House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book, I'd like to kill everyone in the Mainstream Media."

Proving that he has no issue fanning the flames of political violence in this country, less than a year went by before Bernard said that he were attacked by The New York Times like they allegedly attack Bill O'Reilly “I probably would have gotten a baseball bat and gone down to the New York Times with it and found the person that wrote the editorial, but that's me.”

Stopped Clock
Even though he is not a fan of Barack Obama, even he had to admit some on his side were being overly critical of the President. In 2009, he told Sean Hannity that "we have to stop going out of our way to find fault with every single thing he [Obama] does.” Later that year, he called out the various conservatives on Fox News who had needlessly and incorrectly compared Obama to Adolf Hitler and who had used false information to promote the Tea Party.