Bernard Goldberg

An excerpt from

Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distorts the News

by Bernard Goldberg

A reporter in the Miami bureau of CBS News was covering a story about two white men who were accused of abducting and setting on fire a black man. In the script, which was emailed to the reporter’s bosses in New York, the victim was described as a black man. A senior producer told the reporter to change the victim’s description from black to African American. This may seem harmless enough, except for one thing. The victim wasn’t American, he was a Jamaican. That, one might reasonably conclude, might be the end of the matter, but it wasn’t. “Change the name to African-American or the story doesn’t get on the air”, the producer said. If the change was made, it would be factually incorrect. But, to get his story on the air, the reporter did as he was told.

Being sensitive is not a bad thing, and being careful about how people are portrayed is no small matter either. But this sensitivity stems from something more deep than that – an ongoing journey of the liberal community for redemption from the white guilt caused by the inevitable gratitude that one feels from being white in America, and not black. This guilt is what drives many white media elites to obsess about such things as making sure we don’t describe a man from the Caribbean as black, but as African-American.

The mainstream media’s ultra-sensitivity about how they label people is not about actually doing good. It is for the benefit of the elite executives who encourage it. All the concern isn’t about compassion for the down-trodden. It is about the elites feeling better about themselves, while making as little personal sacrifice as possible.

I once suggested to Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News, that there was a fool-proof way to change the racial power structure in America, not in ten or twenty years, but literally overnight. Effective right now, I said, you and every other white male high level executive in America should voluntarily give your jobs to a qualified woman or member of a minority group, starting tomorrow morning. The face of corporate America would immediately change, I said.

Andrew Heyward did not like the idea, not one bit. That would have cost him something, and that’s not how the game works. But, making sure Jamaicans are called African-Americans instead of black costs Heyward and the other media elites nothing. And that’s just how they like it.

Redemption for America’s, and the media’s, deplorable racial history never came so cheap. They love affirmative action as long as their own kids get into Ivy League schools. They love handing out jobs based on racial preferences, as long as they get to keep theirs. It’s a great deal. It’s always somebody else who has to make the sacrifice. Sometimes it’s Asian-American kids, sometimes white kids who don’t get into places like Harvard and Yale and Princeton, while the white liberal elites get to claim credit for being so very decent, the saviors of black people in America. “What the liberal really wants is to bring about change which will not in any way endanger his position”, is how Stokley Carmichael once put it.

So, in the end, the liberals who command the highest positions among the media elites are not generous at all. They’re really quite selfish. They distort images not to ease the pain of black Americans, but to ease their own pain, to make themselves feel less guilty and, most importantly, to prove how good and caring they are.

Posted by John Eidson, a white conservative who takes great pleasure in black success. In addition to postings on MyBlackPolitics, he also contributes wealth-building ideas to MyBlackMoney.