Shadowing the Cavemen

...I miss how much fun it is to be told you said something that offended the anchorman and that he's very, very upset and that he's in his big office pouting and may never, ever talk to you again...

...At CTUALLY, IT'S MORE ACADEMIC THAN THAT...

...Not bloody likely, but Goldberg makes it sound so imaginable...

...It's a shame I have to describe such common sense as uncommon wisdom...

...What classical journalism demands is intellectual honesty, not necessarily recusal...

...You can spend twelve weeks at the National Journalism Center (shameless plug, shameless) for a fraction of that...

...True conservatives, sympathetic as we are to capitalism, know that the marketplace is not the final determinant of value...

...So, for conservative best-selling authors, who gets to be Al Pacino...

...My favorite chapter (I write this shamelessly as director of a training program we half-facetiously describe as the anti-journalism school) is Goldberg's take on the state of preparation for the nonprofession (it's a craft, and as such blissfully free of licensure...

...Not when the distortions Goldberg chronicles, regularly reinforced by denial and arrogance, so completely poison the public discourse...

...Smart-assedly and wonderfully...

...Mar more learning took place at the Amsterdam Grill over a couple pitchers of beer than ever took place at Columbia...

...In the sheer deliciousness of its content, that is...

...That's where we would finally have the open, freewheeling discussions we should have had in the classroom...

...Karl is a better reporter than that and must have been having a bad day...

...The ongoing reality check refreshed and renewed him...

...Goldberg's most important prescription is to get Far more learning took place at the sterdam Grill over a couple of pitchers of beer than ever took place at Columbia...

...I even miss those great secret conversations no one is ever supposed to learn about, where liberal producers tell you that no one in 'our' audience gives a crap about black people so let's not do stories about them...

...He teams with the angels...

...Note to aspiring journalists: You don't have to spend fifty thousand to get placed in the prestigious media...

...If they don't take it, he advises, they'll be buried in the rubble of their own delusions...

...1 AVE PUBLISHING HOUSES, especially conservative publishing houses, learned something from, yikes!, the movie industry...

...The big exception, critics in their echo-chamber manner famously agree, was Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather H. Heck, even I agree with that...

...Arrogance—though the book-buying public, after feasting on Bias, might not wish to gorge on such rich fare—deserves wide circulation, absolutely demands to be taken seriously, and should be placed on the reader's permanent shelf as a penetrating picture of American pathologies as we isolate them shortly into the new millennium...

...Only, with one or two famous exceptions, the follow-ups uniformly disappoint...

...Goldberg, now emboldened to talk loudly about his old colleagues, has resigned himself to not going back: "To be honest," he winks, "there are times when I miss my old pals from network television news...

...You'll have to buy the book to savor all twelve steps, but here's a taste: "Hello...

...So aping the movie industry didn't quite work this time...

...Happily, Goldberg, throughout his years working among the cave-dwellers, fixed his gaze on the outside...

...Goldberg does not use the analogy, but he describes media luminaries who are hopelessly lost in the epistemological depths of Plato's cave, wherein the only reality is their own shadows...

...Indianapolis, Indiana...

...To be sure, Goldberg may frown on the above self-promotion...

...After classes at Columbia, Hayes tells Goldberg, "a handful of us would always go out for beers at the Amsterdam Grill across the street...

...He talks to the Weekly Standard's Stephen F. Hayes, a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School, who should but won't win a Pulitzer for his reporting on the al Qaeda- Saddam Hussein nexus...

...So the sequel surpasses the original...

...That dread corrupter of all things good, true, and beautiful learned years ago that there's seldom too much of a good thing...

...A box-office smash demands a sequel, then another sequel, then a prequel, you know the drill...

...Only Goldberg opts not for cynicism and power...

...He goes after the same unfaithful lowlifes—lowlifes, that is, who live the high life as editors, reporters, and correspondents at our establishKenneth E. Grubbs, Jr., is director of the National Journalism Center and editor ofTheReporter.us...

...Oklahoma City, Oklahoma...

...My name is Dan, and I'm a liberal...

...When Goldberg elsewhere argues for political diversity in the newsroom—i.e., bringing in more conservatives—I think that's what he wants...

...Their editors need to take Goldberg's instruction to heart...

...Better yet, he sees the impending decline of the old, monolithic media who got by enacting a bogus competition among the three networks and two or three top newspapers...

...Is it too much to describe bias and arrogance, on the part of our media, as pathologies...

...As a reviewer, I beseech you, as firmly as possible, to buy this book...

...I'll not gainsay any of the business decisions, either Goldberg's or Warner's, that led to the lower sales figures...

...The former CBS News correspondent has thrown his old colleagues a rope...

...ment newspapers and networks...

...Ann Coulter, obviously, doesn't qualify (unless you consider the teeth-baring, menacing-to-liberals rhetoric...

...Bernie's back with another one-word title, Arrogance...

...He cites ABC's Carole Simpson and CNN's Jonathan Karl's reporting on Bush judicial nominee Charles Pickering, who, they said, imposed a lenient sentence on a bigot convicted of cross-burning...

...An edior might want a reporter who knows the uances of a political position by having participated in its advancement...

...Mitchell, South Dakota...

...Makes you think of Michael Corleone, observing and taking seriously those Cuban revolutionaries his Havana-indulging colleagues resolutely ignore...

...The great good sense of the proposal grows on you...

...All told, the pitchers of beer probably cost me a couple of hundred bucks, while between housing and tuition I was spending in the neighborhood of fifty thousand to go to Columbia...

...Because they're drunk with their informational power and embarrassingly in denial, Goldberg smart-assedly prescribes a Twelve-Step Program for them...

...He does, and exquisitely so, get down in the mud with his erstwhile associates...

...I really miss being told by Ivy League-educated executives that we need to do more 'dog kills baby' stories because that's what those pathetic idiots out there in the double-wides tune in for...

...Byway of accuracy (my movie metaphor couldn't last), Goldberg leapt from his first publisher, Regnery, to a larger house, Warner Books...

...Simpson does typically come off as a priggish school principal whose moral referents grew strictly out of political leftism...

...FEBRUARY 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 59 BOOKS IN REVIEW the whole, not a fragmented, story...

...Subtitled "Rescuing America from the Media Elite," the new book actually makes a stronger case than the first, which did a bang-up job...

...This is serious—and goes directly to the heart of the bias and arrogance plaguing journalism...

...Wisely, Goldberg advises the big newsrooms to hire talented, enthusiastic graduates of less-known schools...

...and Laughlin, Nevada...

...That's Step 1. For Step 2, he audaciously proposes that media executives lose their enablers by moving their headquarters from Manhattan to any of the following five Middle American cities: Tupelo, Mississippi...

...He quotes Abe Rosenthal, former executive editor of the New York Times who dragged the paper's news staff kicking and screaming back to the center: "`I don't care if my reporters f--- the elephants,' Abe reportedly said, `but if they do, they're not covering the circus.' "In other words—in case we actually need other words—if a reporter takes sides in a controversial issue, the reporter cannot be allowed to cover news regarding that issue," Goldberg insists...

...That's a disquieting thought when you contemplate which directions the Republic may take and how much guidance we expect from these supposed truth-tellers...

...He even advises them to hire college dropouts, like, well, Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken, disqualified today (a) for lack of degree and (b) for lack of diversity...

...The true story is far more complex, revealing a Pickering more outraged by cross-burning than maybe even Julian Bond...

...Alas, as I write, Goldberg's publisher announces that it's slashing the dust jacket price, sales—even through the Yuletide—coming in lower than projected...

...Though generally on target, he strikes me as a bit of a scold on journalistic ethics, possibly a product of the extreme scrupulosity that overcame the media back in the '70s...

...Cable, satellite, talk radio, the 58 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2004 BOOKS IN REVIEW Internet—all these have chipped away at the monolith's foundations, promising imminent collapse...

...My nominee: Bernard Goldberg, who first tommy-gunned the elite media, from the inside, in a pivoting, 360-degree sweep, with his best-selling book Bias...

...That sort of step would indeed go far toward rescuing America from the media elite...