Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another

by Matt Taibbi

Take, for instance, the Why Do They Hate Us? question, about why the public mistrusts the press. The highest priest of the “Liberal Bias” question is Emmy-winning former CBS producer Bernard Goldberg. Goldberg crafted the modern conservative take on liberal media, beginning with a 1996 editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Networks Need a Reality Check.” Most of the modern tenets of the liberal-bias religion are found in that early editorial, which he elucidated at greater length with a subsequent smash-hit number one bestselling book, Bias. If one could surgically remove its obnoxious thesis, and re-cast it as a lurid tell-all about egomaniacal network TV personalities, Bias would actually be a funny book. With a few tweaks, you could re-write it as The Unbearable Full-of-Shitness of Dan Rather and you’d have the raw material for a great comic movie, or a long-running series in the Larry Sanders vein. Unfortunately, he went another way.