That Bias Dog Won't Hunt Here
To paraphrase one of our great American communicators, there they go again. Apparently tiring of looking for liberal bias in fictional television shows and keeping the candles lit on the Clinton obsession front, the good folks over at NewsBusters have once more turned their liberal-extinguishing death ray in the direction of us here at PE. In this case, Tim Graham has a problem with one of our features, "Outside Voices":
Here's a technical question for the folks at the CBS website Public Eye: Can you really call a feature 'Outside Voices' and then feature a pile of former and present CBS employees? (They've featured former CBS man Leroy Sievers, and Craig Crawford, who's presently paid by CBS to do spots on 'The Early Show.' How 'outside' is that?) The latest feature comes from liberal-bias legend Eric Engberg, who sparked the entire lucrative Bernard Goldberg book career with his obnoxious attacks on Steve Forbes.Here's more:
You do begin to wonder if CBS is going to keep proving its tilt toward liberals in its choice of outside contributors. Here's the breakdown so far. I'd count the CBS News vets as liberals: Engberg, Crawford, and Sievers. The 'outside' liberals also included Dan Kennedy, Jay Rosen, Tom Rosenstiel, and Bob Somerby. To those seven, there are only two conservatives: Jonathan Last of the Weekly Standard and the blogger known as The Anchoress.Since Tim has asked, I'll be happy to answer. First off, "Outside Voices" is intended to help spur thought and discussion about what's happening in the media at large in general and CBS News in specific. For that purpose it seems logical to seek "Voices" that can speak with some level of expertise in those areas, and that includes folks who once worked for CBS – in some cases just peripherally. We seek a wide variety of voices and do not dictate the content or edit it for anything other than spelling and grammar. This week we'll hear from Stephen Spruiell of National Review Online. I would challenge Tim or anyone else to find for me another outlet that actively seeks criticism of the news organization they are connected with.
I realize that anyone working in mainstream media is "liberal" to the folks at NewsBusters, but reality suggests otherwise. Engberg is a good case in point. Yes, it was a "Reality Check" Engberg did on Steve Forbes that was the focus of Bernie Goldberg's career-altering Wall Street Journal op-ed on bias in the media. But Graham ignores a huge body of investigative work by Engberg that includes many stories highly critical of the Clinton administration. Those included a series of reports on Clinton's poor record of keeping his '92 campaign promises that carried all the way through the '96 election and an expose of how Clinton cabinet secretaries abused their "protective details" to gain perks. That one helped lead to an internal and a congressional investigation into the practice.
More importantly, anyone who actually read Engberg's "Outside Voices" (or any of the others for that matter) would be hard-pressed to find anything other than criticism of how the media and CBS work. Indeed, Engberg's position on anonymous sources is diametrically opposed to liberal orthodoxy. There has been far more discussion about structure, time-slots and the impact of blogs on the news industry than about issues of bias in the feature thus far. Even Graham intimates there's more here than a complaint of bias, writing, "I'll confess I also have a bit of personal history with Engberg, who sneered at me on the phone back in 1995 that I was a 'lying little worm.'"
It might be best to let this kind of criticism go. After all, a fight is what NewsBusters is after, as if that would somehow validate the accusation. But we're proud of the work we've done on Public Eye over the first two months of our existence. We've taken on tough issues and answered tough questions. We've tried to provide a glimpse inside the process and have a little fun along the way. There are many things our work can be criticized for, but bias is not one of them.