Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [12]
Women getting the vote—good . . . for women! Just kidding. It’s good for everybody!!!
African-Americans getting the vote—good . . . for African-Americans! Kidding again. Good for Democrats!!!
Making mistakes—bad, but inevitable
Correcting mistakes—good, but not inevitable
Calling those who point out mistakes “unpatriotic”—itself unpatriotic
Owning up to our mistakes—brave
America—home of the brave
6
I Bitch-Slap Bernie Goldberg
In January of 2003, I was asked to appear on the MSNBC show Donahue with Bernard Goldberg, the former CBS correspondent whose best-seller, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distorts the News, purports to take on the liberal media bias. Slander and Bias are the right’s one-two punch against the effete lefty elite.
The Donahue show was going to be taped live in front of a studio audience at Rockefeller Center in New York. I was in San Francisco making big money with one of my hilarious and well-received corporate speeches, and I hate appearing on these shows via satellite. It puts you at a disadvantage. Still, I had read Bernie’s book a few months earlier, and I had a few problems with it. So I said yes.
A couple weeks after I did the show, I was stopped by a TV news producer (not from CBS) who said, “Man, you really bitch-slapped Bernie Goldberg.”
Yeah, I did. But I have to admit, I did it a little unfairly. I ambushed Bernie. With his own book.
I asked him about something from his chapter, “Liberal Hate Speech.” (Coulteresque, huh?) In the chapter, he cites twelve examples of “liberal hate speech” from the past twelve years. Goldberg admits he got them from the Media Research Center, a right-wing media-watch group which sends out a regular newsletter chock-full of “outrageous” quotes from the liberal media. Now, considering the hundreds of thousands of hours of mainstream media coverage over that period, you’d think Goldberg would have some pretty choice examples to pick from, right?
One of the twelve examples was a quote from John Chancellor, the late, revered NBC anchor and commentator. Here’s how it appeared in Bias.
It’s short of soap, so there are lice in hospitals. It’s short of pantyhose, so women’s legs go bare. It’s short of snow-suits, so babies stay home in winter. Sometimes it’s short of cigarettes, so millions of people stop smoking involuntarily. It drives everyone crazy. The problem isn’t communism. No one even talked about communism this week. The problem is shortages.
—NBC Nightly News commentator John Chancellor on the Soviet Union,
August 21, 1991
After presenting the quote, Goldberg tears Chancellor a new one for “his absurd observation that the problem in the old Soviet Union wasn’t communism, but shortages.”
Hmm. The quote was from August 1991. So, on Donahue, I read the quote, then asked, “Do you know what happened that day in the Soviet Union, Bernie?”
He froze. Then came back with a good one: “Why don’t you tell me?”
I had learned how to handle that trick in the schoolyard back in Minnesota. “No,” I said, “why don’t you tell me?”
Clearly, the man had no idea. I persisted, “What happened in the Soviet Union that day?”
Bernie went white. Finally, “Well, I don’t know what happened that day.”
So, I told him. Let’s go to the videotape:
FRANKEN: That was the collapse of the coup, the hard-liner coup at the parliament.
GOLDBERG: And?
FRANKEN: And that was huge. Do you know that perestroika had been in effect for six years at that point? The point here is, Bernie, you regurgitated a quote that you got from some right-wing media-watch group. And you did not care to look at the context of it. Listen to how Tom Brokaw opened that evening’s news.
“Good evening. Wednesday, August 21, 1991. This is a day for bold print in history to be remembered and savored as the day when the power of the people in the Soviet Union proved to be greater than the power of the gray and cold-blooded men who thought they could return that country to the