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Boy, it sounds like a real pro-communist bias on NBC, doesn’t it? But you know what, Bernie? You didn’t even bother to find out what the context of John Chancellor—who, by the way, is dead, and couldn’t defend himself. You had no interest in finding out the context of what he was saying.

I was talking into a camera in San Francisco, so I couldn’t see Bernie. But when I watched the tape later, I have to admit I got a real kick out of watching Bernie sitting there silently, stewing. He knew he looked like a fool, because I was right. He had thrown something in his book without checking it. Frankly, when I had first read the quote in Goldberg’s book, I hadn’t known the context either. I’m a comedian. But I had a sneaky suspicion that John Chancellor had never been a Stalinist.

So, I, the comedian, bothered to look it up and get the transcript for the August 21, 1991, NBC Nightly News broadcast. Brokaw had asked Chancellor about Gorbachev’s next move. And what Chancellor was saying was that Gorbachev couldn’t use communism as an excuse because, by that point, he had completely dismantled communism in the Soviet Union.

Alan Greenspan would have agreed with what Chancellor was saying. And yet Goldberg had accused John Chancellor of “liberal hate speech.”

Now I’m on the satellite, asking Goldberg to respond. And he can’t. So Phil turns to another guest, a right-wing radio talk show host named Jeff Whitaker, “Now, Mr. Whitaker, you wanted to say briefly?”

And Whitaker says, “As many examples as Al can pull out, I can pull out a lot of leads into the nightly news.” What the hell does that mean? I was talking about Goldberg’s book.

And that’s when I started yelling from San Francisco, “I want to hear Bernie. This is about accountability.”

But nothing from Bernie. And as Phil goes to commercial, I’m still shouting, “Phil, why are you letting Bernie off?” When I watched the tape a few days later, I realized I may have appeared just a bit aggressive.

A little later in the show, Donahue took a caller.

DONAHUE: Billy from Tennessee. You waited. I thank you for your patience. What did you want to say?

CALLER: Phil, thank you. I think the main thing I wanted to say is I’m sad that the conservatives you have on tonight have done a poor job of articulating our conservative argument, which I think is another bias of the press is that you always pick very smart, astute liberals, like Al Franken, who are very articulate, and then you have conservatives who scratch their heads and can’t come back with something.

DONAHUE: Oh, well . . .

(Laughter.)

Still later, Donahue turned to Bernie and said, “You know, I think you’ve been wounded tonight, kid.”

He had been wounded. But unfortunately, because I was three thousand miles away, I wasn’t able to shake hands with him after the show and take him out for a drink. If I’d been there, that’s exactly what I would have done. And sipping my sake bomb, I would have explained to him what a travesty his book is.

It really should have been called Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How CBS Didn’t Give Him the Career He Wanted. On 72 of the book’s 232 pages, Goldberg settles scores with his old boss Dan Rather. A representative sample: “If CBS News were a prison instead of a journalistic enterprise, three quarters of the producers and 100 percent of the vice presidents would be [Rather’s] bitches.”

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Point/Betterpoint

I think Goldberg’s most valid point is that reporters tend to have more liberal views than the public on social issues. In one case, Goldberg cites an eighteen-year-old Los Angeles Times survey of three thousand journalists nationwide showing that they have more liberal views than the general public on things like gun control (78 percent of journalists favored tougher controls eighteen years ago, while only half the public did), prayer in public schools (74 percent of the public said yes eighteen years ago; 75 percent of journalists said no), and the death penalty (eighteen years ago, 75 percent of the public supported it,