Eric Alterman provides the leftist response to Bernard Goldberg's book, Bias, with his own mish-mash of personal vendettas and semi-sourced claims. His vitriol is reserved for those he sees as part of a right-wing noise machine, much of it masquerading as journalists (he takes time out to particularly vilify George Will). He also proclaims that media owned and influenced by corporate titans must be, by definition, conservative - an argument which must be a balm to the heart of socialists everywhere, even though such a correlation only exists in 300-level Marxist Theory classes.

Alterman falls into two traps in his screed: the first is deleting his sources from the material: multiple claims of "thorough debunking" are referred to his website, rather than his book. If the evidence for your argument is not co-located with said argument, that's, in my opinion, lazy. Furthermore, he makes a series of unfounded declarations, upon which much of his argument about what's wrong with media is based: Wealthy people cannot understand working class problems, There is no left-wing attack machine, Corporate-owned media must be conservative. As tiresome as Goldberg's axe-grinding got, at least he was entertaining to read.