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October 25, 2004
The Insider and Bias
For all the recent talk about CBS and Rather, one thing that was not talked about much was the movie The Insider. I had never seen it before and finally got a chance to watch it a few weekends ago. I have no idea how accurate the movie was to real life and although it tries to be complex, the main hero played by AL Pacino is a heroic leftist producer at 60 Minutes who strives only for the truth about tobacco, while everyone else at 60 Minutes seems to care most about covering their ass. Pacinos character is a bit complex as he tries to get information from Russell Crowe, while still protecting his source. All in all a decent, if predictable, movie that was very well directed.
The funniest part is the one mention of Dan Rather is a joke at his expense about how he is complaining about his chair again. In all the talk about the truth and making sure the news tells the truth, Rather is not mentioned even though pretty much every other prominent CBS news person is. As liberal a film as The Insider is, it does not make Dan Rather seem any more serious than the profile put forth in Bias by Bernard Goldberg another major work about CBS that was largely not talked about much during the height of the Rather forged document controversy.
I read Bias over a year ago and Goldberg's thesis was that CBS in particular is biased in how they present the news because they do not know any better. Their news producers, writers, and reporters are liberal and when doing stories look for the angle that is most familiar to them. His original critique was that in a story about Steve Forbes and the flat tax the reporter got lots of damning quotes from opponents of the idea and ridiculed the idea as too risky to try in America first. The reporter did not even make an attempt to get the other side of the story, even though there are several very respected economists who support the idea. These include Nobel prize winners in economics who think the idea of a flat tax is a good idea for the United States. Goldberg claims it is not through malice but through ignorance that reporters are biased and that the lack of conservative voices in the news room means there is no check or balance of liberal perspective. Goldberg describes Rather as a prima donna unable to handle dissent or criticism. This seems accurate in light of Rathers reaction to critics when caught in a lie about Bush and even seems to fit the brief description of him in The Insider. Whether the decision to use such suspect documents in the first place was done because of malice or ignorance is less clear.
Posted by Pete at October 25, 2004 04:26 PM
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