Von Hoffman: TV Media Biased and Inept

Bernard Goldberg, author of "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News," is right on with his charge that the three major networks are tilted to the left, admits columnist Nicholas von Hoffman. But, he adds, Goldberg failed to add that they are also inept.

Writing in the New York Observer, von Hoffman recalled that Goldberg's crusade against media bias began with his op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, noting that "To the readers of The Wall Street Journal, it could not have come as new news that the three old-line networks were stocked with fuzzy-headed liberals."

But that's only the half of it, according to von Hoffman. "If Bernie were to prevail and the liberal bias were to be expunged from network news," he wrote, "we would not be measurably better off, because biased news is probably better than no news and no news is most of what those programs serve up."

He cites a cable TV show "Beggars and Choosers," which he calls a "funny, funny comedy built around life in the West Coast headquarters of a major television network as accurately parodying network news operations.

Dial in on the series, he writes, and you'll see "the caving in to screech-owl feminism, the ass-kissing of ethnic-minority-rights racketeers (which leads them to create a new show called, I think, The Woos of Weehawken), the kowtowing to preposterous claims of political homosexuality, the whole nine yards of craven, cotton-headed, automatic reflex liberalism."

He recalls that when Henry Luce, the founder of Time, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, etc., "was asked why he hired so many lefties, he supposedly said that Republicans can't write."

"That was many years ago. Today, the lefties can't write either. The ones you see on a channel like CNN are dribble heads," von Hoffman observed. "The news girls - and I use the word advisedly - are very cute, and I presume the news boys are the same to female eyes, but their mouths are full of malapropisms and their heads of synthetic fiber. When you hire for looks, that's what you get."

"Left, right and center, people by the tens of millions have stopped watching network news," von Hoffman concluded. "And that may be a healthy thing if it betokens skepticism, disbelief and an effort to find out for one's self."

Has Von Hoffman changed his liberal spots? You decide.

                         Nicholas von Hoffman's article in this week's New York Observer has
                         received the most attention, due to its timing (it reached the newsstands earlier this
                         week) and because of Andrew Sullivan's implementation of the Von Hoffman Awards
                         (for "the most prophetically challenged pieces of media war-wisdom so far"). Some
                         choice bits:

                         "The war in Afghanistan, the one he should never have declared, has run into trouble.
                         Just a few weeks into it and it’s obvious that the United States is fighting blind. The
                         enemy is unknown, and the enemy’s country is terra incognita. We have virtually no one
                         we can trust who can speak the languages of the people involved. With all our
                         firepower and our technical assets and our spy satellites, it looks like we don’t know if
                         we’re coming or going.

[…]

                         Even with the timid and occasionally treacherous help of the Pakistanis, we are flying in
                         fog. We go to the right, we go to the left; statements are issued and then modified. It’s
                         nuts. No sooner had Congress and the President gone to war against Osama bin Laden
                         than we broadened the fight to include the Taliban. Next there was the talk that the
                         citizens of Afghanistan, the land of the woebegone and woebegotten, would turn
                         against their masters, accept Christian baptism and embrace Americanism. Our lunacy
                         has reached the point of scattering sheets of paper around Taliban installations on
                         which is printed a picture of firemen raising the American flag with the legend "Freedom
                         Endures."

                         We are mapless, we are lost, and we are distracted by gusts of wishful thinking. That
                         our high command could believe the Afghani peasantry or even the Taliban would
                         change sides after a few weeks of bombing! This is fantasizing in high places. In the
                         history of aerial bombardment, can you think of a single instance of the bombed
                         embracing the bombers? Bombing always unites the bombees against the bombers,
                         and—duh!—guess what the reaction has been in Afghanistan? You don’t need to speak
                         Urdu to figure it out, which is good since none of us does."

The Illuminated Donkey

[W]ondering where you might catch this seemingly groundbreaking show? It might be tough, especially because Beggars and Choosers, a short-lived Showtime series, was cancelled last February, and I believe now only appears in reruns on one of the auxiliary Showtime networks (Showcase).

So I guess von Hoffman’s point is that Goldberg needn’t have bothered writing the best-selling Bias, which has garnered huge media attention, since the topic has already been completely covered by a nearly unknown, now-defunct cable television show. Makes sense to me.

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