Posted on 04/11/2003 3:05:21 PM PDT by Remedy
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – Veteran CBS correspondent and best-selling author Bernard Goldberg predicts that the liberal media establishment will collapse much like the Berlin Wall.
Speaking at special NewsMax NewsMaker Forum on Thursday, Goldberg said that millions of Americans are voting with their feet and getting their news from alternative media including Fox News Channel, talk radio and Web sites such as NewsMax.com.
Goldberg explained that liberal media bias, despite an almost total blackout in Big Media about his book "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News," had created a tremendous market for it and helped make it a No. 1 New York Times best seller. (You can get an autographed copy of "Bias" from NewsMax – just click here.
Goldberg’s prediction of the coming collapse of the leftist media establishment came on the heels of news that FNC’s morning show "Fox & Friends," a cable program, actually beat CBS’s morning show, a broadcast TV program available to far more viewers. If Larry King Interviewed Hitler …
The journalist shared the humorous side of liberal media bias.
"If Hitler were a guest on the Larry King show, Larry would ask, ‘Did you get hit by jet lag coming in?’" Goldberg joked.
"Bernard Goldberg is a man of courage and vision," explained Christopher Ruddy, editor-in-chief of NewsMax, who hosted Goldberg with several hundred NewsMax readers in attendance.
Goldberg said that his boss at CBS, Dan Rather, told him he was "dead" for revealing Rather’s and CBS News’ leftward bias. 'Traitor'
Noting that other liberal media colleagues called him a "traitor" after his groundbreaking book was published, Goldberg observed: "These are guys who don’t call real traitors a traitor. Have you ever heard a liberal news media elite call anybody a traitor? They didn’t even call that kid from Marin County, California, who was fighting with the Taliban a traitor. But they called me a traitor."
The gutsy journalist explained that contrary to the opinion of some conservative critics, the media’s liberal bias is not the result of a conspiracy. 'Provincial' Elitists
"What happens," he said, "is arguably worse. The media elite fancy themselves sophisticated, worldly people, but they are very provincial.
"They live in a bubble. The bubble is basically Manhattan and Georgetown and Washington. They go to cocktail parties and dinner parties with their smart sophisticated liberal friends in these places.
"After a while they can spot a conservative 10,000 miles a way, through brick. But they honestly think their views aren’t liberal but simply reasonable. They think they’re moderate. They think they’re mainstream. They mostly think they’re civilized whether it’s about gay rights, abortion or feminism or any of the big important social issues of our time.
"They think their views are civilized and reasonable and moderate and mainstream because ‘all my friends think that way about it.’ Then they stack their newsrooms with other like-minded people, and a kind of invisible consensus forms so that they’re either hostile to any views they don’t share or they don’t even know these views exist. So that no matter how you feel – take gay rights, for example … I acknowledge that gay marriage is a controversial subject, but we’ve had thousands of years of religious thought on this subject – to not think it’s controversial is crazy.
"Well, they don’t think these things are controversial, and that’s liberal bias. It isn’t blatant. It isn’t about going easy on Democrats and tough on Republicans. These guys would run over their liberal grandmother if they thought it would do them some good. It’s about how they see the whole world. And they see the world living in this bubble."
Goldberg cited comically horrific examples of the view from the leftist media bubble:
The late film critic Pauline Kael’s reaction to Richard Nixon’s landslide victory over George McGovern: "I don’t know how Richard Nixon could have won. I don’t know anybody who voted for him."
"What kind of bubble did she live in?" an astounded Goldberg wondered.
Just a few weeks ago, when America was deeply divided on the wisdom of invading Iraq and millions of Americans were taking one side or another, Mary McGrory of the Washington Post wrote, "Of all the people I know, nobody is for the war in Iraq."
How, Goldberg asked, "could you be a columnist for the Washington Post and not know anybody – her word – who’s for a war in Iraq." If It’s Not on CBS, Did It Not Happen?
Goldberg said that he’d been on talk radio shows all across the U.S. and interviewed by media outlets all over the world, but the three major U.S. media outlets that would not have him on were ABC, NBC and CBS.
He noted that NBC did offer to put him on one show – on the condition that he appear with, of all people, the disreputable and far-left Michael Moore, with the moderate Goldberg supposedly representing the far right.
Other nuggets from his talk:
The left’s newest claim, that there is conservative bias because of the preponderance of talk radio shows with right-wing views, ignores the fact that talk radio is opinion, whereas network newscasts and newspaper articles are not supposed to be opinion. The success of talk radio is the public’s reaction to the overwhelming leftist bias of the mainstream media dispensed as news.
The rejection of the media establishment is a rejection of what liberalism has become in America. This, he said, is why people have consistently rejected liberal talk radio.
When Andy Rooney made the amazing admission on the Larry King show that Dan Rather is "transparently liberal," only one newspaper in the U.S. reported it: the Washington Times.
Goldberg said that though he had long been a liberal, he has moved has found himself moving more to the right. He asked the audience if they knew anyone who was a conservative but became a liberal. "It doesn’t happen that way," he noted.
When Churchhill (I think it was) said that, it was true. Today's youth are rebelling against the 60's generation. Kids will always rebel against the "establishment". Even if that means they agree with the non-establishment, meaning conservative, parents.
Agreed in regards to the transcripts. They're not all bad, they just drive me nuts with their style.
A case can be made that the way the media elites use the term (as in the elite republican guard), "elite" is either a perjorative term or a sarcastic one.
If they get appointed to the Supreme Court, it will happen.
"They live in a bubble. The bubble is basically Manhattan and Georgetown and Washington. They go to cocktail parties and dinner parties with their smart sophisticated liberal friends in these places.
This is perhaps the ultimate example of group-think in mainstream America. Traditionally, when one thinks about group-think they think of the common people or general public being manipulated by the media academia or some other external authority.
People in general, to varying degrees, have a vested interest in their particular group-think collective group. However, the less the vested interest the easier it is for the individual to educate themselves out of the group-think mentality. For them, they are not trapped.
Now think of the liberal media -- or any cult like group -- that have members that are not allowed to stray from the group's doctrine lest they be labeled a traitor. With cult-like belief they have trapped themselves by entrenched vested interest in the group -- only recognizing self in relation to their standing within the group.
Bernard Goldberg is a rare individual that realized that his own authority was much more powerful than that of the group he had once been a member of.
The liberal media is in fact and effect far more trapped by group-think mentality than the general public. They have set themselves up for eventual and certain collapse. All cult-like groups do it to themselves due to creating illusions of power and prestige wherein they soon after come to believe the illusions they created are real.
This type of authority group-think mentality is prevalent in congress, the judicial branch and executive/alphabet agencies. They too have set themselves up to believe the illusions they've created are real.
* * *
How is it that people and society in general have prospered and increased their well being for decades yet the politicians and bureaucrats say we must have another 3,000 laws and regulations each year on top of the 100,000+ laws already on the books... That without them people and society face "disaster". People and society have done quite well without next year's 3,000 new federal laws and regulations. Why all of a sudden can people and society not continue to do quite well without them? The fact is, they'd be better off without 99% of them.
So who really benefits from 3,000 new laws and regulations each year? -- not to mention state laws and regulations. Politicians and bureaucrats. They create boogieman problems and with a complicit media towing their boogieman problems cast a net of false fear and unwarranted despair in people.
Quite literally, they create problems where none exist. They're sick in that they chose to frighten people and foist false despair on them and do that to collect their unearned paychecks. Their job security is predicated on deceiving as many people as possible.
Fully integrated honesty is key. That we have the government we have that has gone so far off course from the government the founders created is a product of irrationality and dishonesty. Changing the laws via the "system" is almost completely useless. Politicians create dozens of unconstitutional laws before even considering repealing just one unconstitutional law. That is not a system -- it's a quagmire of deception, irrationality, fraud and abuse.
Voting for the lesser of evils always begets evil. How can so many people thinking they're right be so wrong?
Wake up! Politics is not the solution -- politics is the problem.
Who are the producers?
Who are the parasites?
Praise the value producers --
Ostracizing the parasitical value destroyers.
Did Churchill say it as a conservative, classical liberal or neither?
Did he revise Guisot/Clemenceau to mean socialist = liberal?
Charles Krauthammer [op-ed, May 25] quotes Winston Churchill as saying, "If you're not a liberal when you're 20, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative when you're 40, you have no head."
This quotation is frequently but mistakenly attributed to Churchill. It is anyway unlikely that Churchill would subscribe to this philosophy: He was a swashbuckling soldier at 20, and a Conservative member of Parliament at 25. A couple of years later he switched to the Liberal Party (which was not liberal in the modern sense), and later went back to the Conservatives.
The phrase originated with Francois Guisot (1787-1874): "Not to be a republican at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head." It was revived by French Premier Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929): "Not to be a socialist at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head." -- Peter Rutland
CHURCHILL AND THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY Lord Blake, FBA, JP April 5 ... I have chosen for my theme an aspect of Winston Churchill's extraordinary career, which tends to be forgotten both in Britain and America. We are inclined to think that it began in 1940. But he was 65 by then – an age at which most people have reached retirement. My theme is his relations with the Conservative party. After 1940 they were relatively uncomplicated. Before 1940 it was a different story.
…
….He found himself, at the age of 20, head of the family in precarious financial circumstances. He meant to forge a career, but he felt no great
love for the Conservative Party. Its stuffy conformism had destroyed his father – or so he believed. He would not at once abandon the Churchill family tradition. He would begin as a Conservative, but the allegiance lay lightly on him from the start.
…
Almost from the beginning of his parliamentary career, Churchill was far closer to the right wing of the Liberal Party than to the orthodox Conservatives.
…
For Churchill this was the turning point. Socialism was anathema to him. No one had more vehemently supported the White Russians against the Bolsheviks in 1919-20. No one had been more distressed when Lloyd George withdrew British support and left the White Russians to their fate. To compare Bolshevism with the British Labour Party may seem absurd. For Churchill, however – and he was not alone – the socialism preached by Ramsay MacDonald was merely a watered-down version of Communism. And for communism, as practiced in Soviet Russia, he had unlimited hatred
and contempt. To him it was the embodiment of ruthless terrorism, total tyranny, and destruction of all the value of Western civilization. It would produce grinding poverty, extinguish liberty of thought, belief, speech or the press, and do all in its power to spread its evil doctrines over the rest of the world.
…
In a long letter to The Times, published on 18 January 1924, he proclaimed his position and finally broke with the Liberal Party.
…
And so the greatest statesman to have led the party bowed out. He had been leader for nearly 15 years, but the relationship was often uneasy, especially
after the war. He was a man of genius, energy, vision, a master of the spoken and written word. He had saved England in 1940. But was he really a
Conservative and if so in what sense? Perhaps the answer is that he was an anachronism. It was as if time had been warped in some strange way, and an eighteenth-century Whig was leading a twentieth-century Tory Party.
Kirk: Postwar Conservatism's Prophet by William A. Rusher
Prior to the middle of the 20th century, by far the most powerful conservative force in the United States was the tradition we now call classical liberalism" (to distinguish it from the group of collectivist and redistributionist impulses that hijacked the word "liberalism" for itself a few decades back). Classical liberalism was grounded in the Enlightenment's celebration of the freedom of the individual, and derived from that source the twin concepts of political democracy and a free-market economy.
First in the United States and Britain, then ultimately all over the world, these concepts have constituted an immensely successful strategy for liberating the energies of humanity and furthering its happiness. In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Friedrich Hayek brilliantly restated the principles of classical liberalism in the teeth of the socialist doctrines then threatening to sweep the postwar world.
But mankind needs more than a strategy, however grand; it needs a purpose. One group of classical liberalism's critics, proclaiming the "death of God," had defined humanity's happiness as the ultimate purpose, and set about planning this--thus spawning this century's plague of totalitarian states. Another, more popular in the democracies of the West, had seized on the concept of "liberty" as the ultimate good, and were slowly degrading it into the undisciplined, hedonistic license we see around us today.
That was the state of affairs in 1953 when a young professor at Michigan State University published The Conservative Mind. Russell Kirk was only 34, but in this enormously influential book he almost single-handedly rooted American conservatism in the rich loam of the ancient Judaeo-Christian tradition, and thereby gave it the philosophical heft of a world-view. He also gave it its name: Not even Bill Buckley, defending many of the same principles two years earlier in God and Man at Yale, had called the amalgam "conservatism."
It would take years before Kirk, Buckley and scores of other writers could anneal the various components of American conservatism into the fighting faith it eventually became, and even longer before their new alloy could be hammered into a political weapon capable of dominating American politics. But Kirk never wavered. Year after year the books rolled from his pen: A Program for Conservatives, Academic Freedom, Roots of American Order and dozens more. He lived to see himself honored as one of the earliest and greatest prophets of the conservative dispensation.
By coincidence, the April issue of the American Historical Review carries a perceptive and important article by Professor Alan Brinkley of Columbia University entitled "The Problem of American Conservatism." The "problem," according to Professor Brinkley (who carefully disavows "any personal engagement with or sympathy for conservative politics"), is "finding a suitable place for the Right--for its intellectual traditions and its social and political movements--within our historiographical concerns."
For, as Professor Brinkley goes on to discuss at length, "American conservatism has been something of an orphan in historical scholarship." There are many reasons for this, but ultimately he concludes that what historians must do today is open their minds. "Secular intellectuals," he writes, including most historians must "concede that they have been wrong in some of their most basic assumptions about America in our time." They must "recognize that the progressive modernism that most scholars, and many others, have so complacently assumed has become firmly and unassailably established in America--the secularism, the relativism, the celebration of scientific progress--may not in fact be as firmly entrenched as they thought."
Political Science 1 -- September 4, 2002
Background to the U.S. Constitution.
The founders were Classical Liberals.
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