Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News by Goldberg Bernard

Author:Goldberg, Bernard [Goldberg, Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus Distribution-A
Published: 2001-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

At about 12:20 in the afternoon on February 21, 1996, eight days after the op-ed came out, I spoke by phone with Jon Klein, the executive vice president of CBS News and Heyward’s number two in command.

“Is CBS News going to fire me?” I asked him point-blank.

“If we wanted to fire you,” Klein said, “we would have fired you the day the Wall Street Journal piece ran.”

This was the first indication that perhaps I might survive.

Klein, in his forties, is an Ivy Leaguer, a graduate of Brown. He’s very smart, but, like a lot of TV executives, he’s someone you wouldn’t want to turn your back on. Jon is on the small, thin side, wears eyeglasses, and comes off as a cross between a well-dressed Woody Allen... and Machiavelli. He’s very creative, but at CBS News he had a reputation as the kind of guy who thought people who tell the truth do it mainly because they lack imagination.

So when he hinted that I might survive, I was skeptical.

If CBS had done that—fired me the day the WSJ piece came out—I told Klein, it would have touched off a major battle CBS News didn’t need.

“Can you imagine the headlines?” I said. “‘The House That Murrow Built Fires Correspondent for Taking on Bias in the News.”’ I was talking with far more confidence than I actually had. “CBS News Unloads Renegade Correspondent,” was more like it.

“If CBS News had fired me the day the op-ed piece came out,” I told Klein, “it would have been a public relations disaster.” After all, millions of Americans agree with me, I told him. Once you leave Manhattan, you hear all the time about how biased the big, national media are.

I was whistling past the graveyard.

Klein was calm and matter-of-fact. I’ve never known him to get rattled. So he first reminded me that by writing the op-ed piece I had violated my contract, which says that CBS News journalists had to get prior approval before submitting articles for publication. Technically, CBS News could have fired me for that and that alone, he said, and technically I guess he was right. But I reminded him that others, including Dan Rather, had written controversial op-ed pieces without getting approval, and nothing ever happened to any of them.

Good point, I thought, but I knew it wasn’t good enough to save me if that’s what it came down to.

I also knew that the United States Constitution wasn’t going to save me, either. I understood that I had no First Amendment, free-speech rights. The First Amendment prohibits only government from telling us what we can and can’t say. Corporations are not democracies. Nor should they be. They’re more like dictatorships, when you get right down to it—some run by benevolent dictators, some by not-so-benevolent dictators. But these dictators—bosses, managers, whatever you want to call them—have businesses to run, and they can pretty much fire the hired help for almost any reason beyond race, color, and creed type of stuff. They can send employees packing for saying they like sunny days or corn flakes or anything else.

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