Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Bias is fun, but not that informative

The Wall Street Journal hyped Bias by Bernard Goldberg in it's lead editorial column yesterday:

He explains matters like the strange way anchors have of identifying conservatives as such but not those on the other side of the political spectrum. And so CBS identifies the famously radical feminist and leftist Catharine MacKinnon as a "noted law professor" while Phyllis Schlafly is a "conservative spokeswoman." Rush Limbaugh is the "conservative radio talk show host" but Rosie O'Donnell, who (while hosting a fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton) referred to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as "New York's village idiot," is not described as the liberal TV talk show host. What this says, Mr. Goldberg notes, is that conservatives require identification because--in the world view that prevails at the networks--they are outside the mainstream.

Here's the problem. The WSJ just gave you about 15% of the hard information in Bias. An awful lot of the book is invective against the CBS folks (particularly Dan Rather) who ostracized him. Not that that isn't amusing (much like a late night blog post, really), but I felt there could have been more hard examples of how the bias affects the presentation.

I believe those examples are all around us. Lord knows the blogging community and special purpose 'zines like Smartertimes pick them up every day. So I was disappointed that Goldberg left himself open to the inevitable dismissal from the left as a "polemic." This time, they will have some justification for making that charge.

Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at January 3, 2002 06:09 AM | Technorati inbound links