Breaking: Bernie Goldberg Joins Trump Admin as “Fake News Czar”

President Trump with newly named Fake News Czar, Bernie Goldberg.

FOR IMMEDIATE PUBLICATION: Former CBS News correspondent and media analyst, Bernie Goldberg, has accepted the newly created White House position of Fake News Czar.

Goldberg’s new job will see him holding weekly “Fake News” meetings, on behalf of the Trump White House, with select members of the mainstream media. The stated purpose: dealing with “Fake News lies“ and “making the media great again.”

“I love this guy, Goldberg,” President Trump told reporters this morning, just before stepping aboard Marine One. “He’s like an iceberg, not a Goldberg. That’s what I call him, ‘Bernie Iceberg.’ Because he’s the iceberg and the fake news media is the Titanic. And we all know what happened when the Titanic hit that iceberg. Did you see that movie? Nobody really knew what happened to the Titanic until that movie came out. Very sad.”

Despite Goldberg’s vocal criticisms of bias in the mainstream media for over 20 years (which include multiple bestselling books on the topic), his hire by the White House will assuredly surprise many.

Goldberg has been a frequent critic of President Trump’s personal conduct and his broad “Fake News” attacks on the national media. In fact, many speculate that such critiques were behind the Fox News Channel sidelining Goldberg for nearly a year, until his contract as a network contributor expired.

The president hasn’t always been a fan of Goldberg’s either. Prior to today, Trump’s last public statement on Goldberg came from a tweet in late 2015, in which Trump wrote that Goldberg (a winner of 14 Emmys and 3 duPont awards), “just doesn’t know about winning!”

Goldberg shed some light on his unlikely partnership with the White House in an early-morning conference call with reporters.

“To be honest, I’m just getting sick and tired of people on social media confusing me with Bernie Sanders,” said Goldberg. “I figured that if I actually work for the Trump administration, on the opposite side of the political aisle from Sanders, people may eventually figure out that not all white-haired Jewish guys named Bernie are the same person.”

Not everyone is convinced that Goldberg’s motivations are quite so innocent. According to Twitter handle “@NotRussianBot_2343225800231,” Goldberg is “a dAm #NeverTrump LIBTARD” and “deeeep state SPY!” who’s intent on “UNsitting our duly elexted POTUS!!!”

“Not so,” says Goldberg, who insists that it really is all about the Sanders thing. “Put yourself in my position. I lean conservative on most everything. I believe in capitalism. I comb my hair, for God’s sake! I’ve been in front of the cameras for years and years, exposing , and criticizing liberals and socialism. But just because I have white hair, my name is Bernie, and I sometimes say critical things about our president, people suddenly think I’m that crazy socialist guy who keeps running for president on a platform of giving everything away for free. It’s annoying! I mean, what would you do?”

According to a well-placed White House source (speaking under the condition of anonymity), Goldberg’s responsibilities during his weekly “Fake News” meetings with the press will include (but are not limited to):

rolling his eyes and saying, “You should be ashamed of yourself” in response to legitimate questions from reporters discounting all negative economic numbers as a “media hoax” making jokes about George Stephanopoulos’s height staging substance-abuse interventions with CNN’s Brian Stelter, in hopes of breaking him of his Fox News addiction proposing print-copies of the Times and Washington Post as viable alternatives for everyday Americans in dealing with the national toilet paper shortage shouting “Fake News” and “you’re not the story” while firmly pressing his finger into the chest of White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, until Acosta is brought to tears.

Update: In light of the global pandemic and the White House’s temporary media rules on social distancing, Goldberg has confirmed that he’ll be using a broomstick to poke Jim Acosta. More on this developing story as it comes in…

The Liberal Media Are Out to Get Donald Trump — Just Ask Ted Koppel

In February 1996 I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about liberal bias in the mainstream news media. At the risk of sounding dramatic, it touched off the media version of World War III.

I was a correspondent at CBS News at the time and here I was either biting the hand that was feeding me or speaking truth to power. I guess it was a little of both.

I had written that “There are lots of reasons fewer people are watching network news, and one of them, I’m more convinced than ever, is that our viewers simply don’t trust us. And for good reason.

“The old argument that the networks and other ‘media elites’ have a liberal bias is so blatantly true that it’s hardly worth discussing anymore. No, we don’t sit around in dark corners and plan strategies on how we’re going to slant the news. We don’t have to. It comes naturally to most reporters.”

The morning the op-ed came out my voicemail box at CBS News was filled with messages – all of them thanking me for what I had written. One of those calls came from a man who simply said, “Goldberg, you got balls. Call me.” That message came from Roger Ailes. Ailes was running a network that didn’t yet exist. Fox News wouldn’t go on TV for 8 more months. I met with him, he offered me a job, I turned him down, and went back to CBS News where I stayed for 4 and a half more years before quitting to write my first book, Bias which picked up where the Journal op-ed left off.

Liberals weren’t as charming as Ailes or as friendly as the many “ordinary” Americans who left messages for me, thrilled that someone on the inside finally said out loud what they were saying in their living rooms. Liberals in the media, on the other hand, did what they always do when faced with criticism: They circled the wagons.

In the New York Post, , whose evening news program I reported for, had this to say about what I wrote:

The test is not the names people call you or accusations by political activists inside or outside your own organization. The test is what goes up on the screen and what comes out of the speaker. I think the public understands that those people are trying to create such a perception because they’re trying to force you to report the news the way they want you to report it. I am not going to do it. I will put up billboard space on 42nd Street. I will wear a sandwich board. I will do whatever is necessary to say I am not going to be cowed by anybody’s special political agenda, inside, outside, upside, downside.

I had no “political agenda” except to finally speak out about bias in the news. Dan was a fearless reporter but he had one glaring fault: He was either unwilling or incapable of taking serious criticism seriously.

Ted Koppel wasn’t buying what I wrote either. On Charlie Rose’s show on PBS, Koppel said this when asked what he thought of my op-ed:

Forgive me, but I thought it was a little facile. I don’t agree with Bernie on that. I don’t think that people are by- and-large conservative or liberal. I mean he was making the point that they tend to be more liberal. I think that we are anti-establishment. I think that journalists, you know, can make their bread and butter going after the establishment, whoever the establishment happens to be. And whether that establishment is conservative or whether that establishment is liberal makes very little difference to most of my colleagues.

That’s what Ted said on February 29, 1996 – two weeks after my column was published. This is Ted Koppel on March 7, 2019, speaking at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:

I’m terribly concerned that when you talk about the New York Times these days, when you talk about the Washington Post these days, we’re not talking about the New York Times of 50 years ago. We are not talking about the Washington Post of 50 years ago. We’re talking about organizations that I believe have, in fact, decided as organizations that Donald J. Trump is bad for the United States.

We have things appearing on the front page of the New York Times right now that never would have appeared 50 years ago. Analysis, commentary on the front page. I remember sitting at the breakfast table with my wife during the campaign after the Access Hollywood tape came out and the New York Times, and I will not offend any of you here by using the language but you know exactly what words were used and they were spelled out on the front page of the New York Times.

I turned to my wife and I said the Times is absolutely committed to making sure that this guy does not get elected. So his perception that the establishment press is out to get him doesn’t mean that great journalism is not being done. It is. But the notion that most of us look upon Donald Trump as being an absolute fiasco, he’s not mistaken in that perception and he’s not mistaken when so many of the liberal media, for example, described themselves as belonging to the Resistance.

What does that mean? That’s not said by people who consider themselves reporters, objective reporters of facts. That’s the kind of language that’s used by people who genuinely believe, and I rather suspect with some justification, that Donald Trump is bad for the United States and they’re betting that the sooner he’s out of office the better they will like it. Whether that happens by virtue of indictment, impeachment or election, we’ll see. … We are not the reservoir of objectivity that I think we were.

There will be no gloating here. No I told you so Ted. But for the record: Liberal bias in the mainstream media didn’t start with Donald Trump. They were biased long before he ran for president. That’s what I was saying in 1996 when Ted wrote me off as “facile.”

But let’s look on the bright side: The good news is an important journalist who is both smart and fair has seen the light and has said what reporters rarely say – in public, out loud: that liberal bias exists and that it’s blatant, even if liberal journalists choose not to see it or do anything about it.

Better late than never Ted.

Reaction to Bernie Goldberg’s ‘Fox News’ Column

As a longtime writing contributor to this website (as well as a manager of some of the social media tied to it), I see a lot of feedback relating to Bernie Goldberg’s columns. So when Bernie talked to me about the idea of creating a Premium Membership (a move he had been weighing for quite some time), I had a pretty good idea of what readers might like from it.

One of those things was ‘question and answer’ access to Bernie, on topics related to politics, culture, and of course the media. Truth be told, Bernie (wisely) doesn’t spend a lot of time on social media, where a lot of these questions are posed. And at a time when media bias has become far less subtle (and far more shameless) then ever before, people have a lot of questions for the guy who literally wrote the book — the definitive book — on the topic.

Because Bernie is no longer on Fox News to answer these types of questions (more on that in a minute), I suggested a Premium Q&A offering once a week, where members can send their questions to Bernie and have them answered directly. Bernie okayed the idea, and that feature is now ready to go. It comes with the Premium Interactive membership, which you can read about here. Answers will be posted every Friday on this website.

That brings me to one particular question to Bernie that I’ve seen a lot from people ask over the past year: Why aren’t you on Fox News anymore?

Well, Bernie finally answered that question in hisfirst premium column, and the piece is a must-read. He explains his status with network, the changing culture at Fox in the post- Ailes era, and why he no longer fit FNC’s preferred mold.

The piece has certainly generated some buzz. It has been covered by multiple political and media websites (Newsweek sensationalized it to the point of absurdity), and shared by a number of journalists. Bernie has also received several interview requests to further explore the topic (we’ll announce his upcoming appearances on social media). But what’s interesting to me is which parts of Bernie’s column, thus far, haven’t been reported or commented on by the news outlets.

For example, Bernie relays a 2012 exchange he had with the late Roger Ailes, back when Ailes was still running the show at Fox. In that exchange, Ailes expressed his belief that media bias should be policed not just on the liberal side, but also on the conservative side. And he (unlike others at the network) had no problem with Bernie doing just that.

I have yet to see that mentioned in any of the reports (or even tweets), nor have I seen any references to Bernie telling Ailes that Fox News was vitally important to the media for allowing voices that the mainstream networks wouldn’t give the time of day to.

Granted, the more topical part of Bernie’s column was the current, prominently pro-Trump environment at Fox (which is both embarrassing and detrimental to news consumers), but the Ailes stuff is important too because it highlights the elements that helped make Fox News successful in the first place — elements that mainstream news organizations could have learned from and emulated, but instead mocked and tried to de- legitimize.

Of course, that was the Fox News of yesteryear. Not the Fox News of today, where dissent is only valued in the interest of combative entertainment, when it comes from an opposition- party foil.

But some things in the cable news industry haven’t changed, notably the incapacity of left-leaning journalists to police their own side — even those of them who bill themselves as impartial media analysts or watchdogs.

Case in point, I knew Bernie’s piece would be shared by CNN’s Brian Stelter:

Mr. Stelter is always happy to cite Bernie when it comes to a criticism of Fox News or Donald Trump (which Stelter seems to spend the bulk of his time on these days):

Bernie Goldberg (!) -> “The main source of fake news in America isn’t NYT or the Post or CNN. It’s the president.” https://t.co/K7tnENyDXo — Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) March 10, 2017

But as someone keenly pointed out on Twitter, not so much (actually never) when it comes to a different topic — one that Bernie talks and writes about much more often:

The one time Brian RTs @BernardGoldberg is when he is hitting FNC. Never when Bernie is hitting the MSM.

— Chris (@CML_Texas) March 6, 2019

In fact, Stelter once even tried to cast Bernie as part of a Fox News propaganda effort. I’m not joking. He tweeted this a little over a year ago, in response to an FNC segment:

Did the president produce this Fox News segment himself? pic.twitter.com/tFcoVXP0Ar

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) December 22, 2017

What Stelter failed to mention was that Bernie spent half of that segment blaming Trump himself for the press’s negative coverage of him. If that’s what constitutes pro-Trump propaganda, it was the worst pro-Trump propaganda ever delivered. But that’s how committed people like Stelter are to pursuing anti-Fox News, anti-Trump narratives.

And it’s another reminder that where Fox News is failing, the other cable news networks aren’t succeeding. Trayvon Martin – The Cast of Characters

On February 26th, I was no where near the shooting of Trayvon Martin so I have no idea what happened. I don’t know Trayvon; I don’t know George Zimmerman. I don’t know if Trayvon did anything to provoke George and I have no idea what went on in George’s head or heart so I have nothing to say about the actual incident because the investigation is still ongoing and we don’t have all the facts.

But that hasn’t stopped a whole lot of other characters from injecting themselves into the national drama.

I’ll leave the media to the experts like Bernie Goldberg whose article Trayvon Martin and Media Hypocrisy tells us all we need to know about the media’s bias and its reporting of the story.

I can’t begin to imagine what Trayvon’s parents are going through, but I also can’t imagine how, amidst all the grieving, his mother had the time, energy and composure to consult an attorney to file trademark applications for “I Am Trayvon” and “Justice for Trayvon.” Enough said.

President Obama was asked a question during one of his press conferences about the case. Not having learned his lesson from the Gates situation at Cambridge, he went head first into the quagmire by saying that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon. With that statement, Mr. Obama did more than just personalize the situation; he put a racial spin on it thereby excluding 86% of Americans. A person with true leadership skills would’ve had us collectively thinking of Trayvon as one of our own young people rather than reminding us that he was a black young man. I guess I have to give him some slack because he was speaking off the cuff without his teleprompter.

Enter poverty pimps, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, the race- baiting maggots who are genetically drawn to any opportunity for national attention. Al Sharpton was calling for the immediate arrest of George before the investigation was completed and only absented himself from the controversy to attend his own mother’s funeral. Jesse Jackson called Trayvon “murdered and martyred.” Jackson told the LA Times that “blacks are under attack,” adding that “targeting, arresting, convicting blacks and ultimately killing us is big business.” How irresponsible can two people be?

I’m not off base here particularly when you have the former NAACP leader C.L. Bryant accusing both Sharpton and Jackson of “exploiting” the Trayvon Martin tragedy to “racially divide this country.”

Who can forget those lovableNew Black Panthers whose spokesman, Mikhail Muhammad, called for vigilante justice, saying “an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth” and offering a $10,000 reward for George’s “capture.” Not a word from President Obama or Eric Holder about this type of vigilantism but then again, it was Eric Holder who failed to follow through with the prosecution of the 2008 New Black Panthers’ voter intimidation case.

Then there’s the moron, Spike Lee, who decided to tweet George’s address but got it wrong and tweeted the address of an elderly couple whose lives were disrupted by this idiot’s need for revenge. Since then, the couple has “settled” with Spike Lee (I hope they got plenty of bucks out of this bozo.) He’s since tweeted an apology. Maybe someone should tweet his address. He is a perfect example of why I cannot and will not separate the man/woman/actor/actress from their politics. As long as I know that one dime of my money will end up in his pocket, I will never see a Spike Lee movie. Period. Before this is over, we’re going to see a whole new bunch of unsavory characters coming out of the woodwork. I’m sure there are plenty of publicity whores thinking right now how they can monetize the situation.

If there’s an arrest and George is put on trial, I’m sure Court TV will have a huge daily audience watching and picking apart every shred of evidence. I will go out on a limb and say that, just like there was no way OJ would ever be convicted, there will be no way that not be convicted.

I don’t get it, but if you do, God bless you.

Bias

In July 2000 I quit CBS News where I had worked for 28 years. A year and a half later – 10 years ago this very month — my first book came out. Bias was about liberal bias in the mainstream news media and it caused quite a stir. Despite the fact that it got more than a few crummy reviews – mainly from journalists (big surprise, there) and other liberals, Bias became a New York Times #1 bestseller, demonstrating how out of touch journalists were with so many Middle Americans who embraced the book. The Times, to my surprise, gave my book a good review and the Wall Street Journal did too. There were others, including the one that follows, written by someone who’s been in the news quite a bit lately: . On the 10th anniversary of the book’s release, I thought I’d share what he wrote with you.

Newt Gingrich Reviews Bernard Goldberg’s ‘Bias’ Bias By Bernard Goldberg Regnery. 232 pp. $27.95

Allowing me to review a book about bias in the news media almost seems unfair. After all, I was portrayed as Scrooge on the cover of Time magazine just before Christmas 1994. They portrayed me holding Tiny Tim’s broken crutch. The headline read: “How Mean Will Gingrich’s America Be to the Poor?” (You could tell it was unbiased because there was a question mark.)

Not to be outdone, Newsweek decided that I more resembled a Dr. Seuss figure, the cover exclaiming, “The Gingrich that stole Christmas.” All this before I had served a single day as speaker of the House.

Bernard Goldberg’s memoir-exposé-essay is a very revealing portrait of the television side of the news. It’s a good read, and Goldberg is a good storyteller. It’s clear he is angry with CBS News in general and Dan Rather in particular (“The Dan even speaks his own secret language, which around CBS is known as Dan-ish. . . . In Dan-ish, ‘it’s all my fault’ means ‘it’s all your fault . . .”). The book is worth its price if only to enjoy the sheer viciousness of the payback. They got Goldberg, and now he is getting them. Anyone who has ever gotten mad over what they perceive as liberal bias in the media will find some satisfaction in this part of the book.

Goldberg, a 28-year CBS correspondent who left the network last year, has done a service by telling insider stories out of school. He describes the bias inherent in ensuring, on the one hand, that minorities do not look bad and, on the other, not showing too many minorities, because doing so might hurt ratings. But he is at his strongest in outlining the sensitivity of the media toward criticism directed at it. An industry that treasures whistleblowers from any other trade, isolates and seeks to expel any such in its own business (which is what happened to Goldberg).

The book makes a strong case that liberal media bias led to a remarkable increase in reporting on homelessness under Presidents Reagan and Bush, followed by its magical disappearance under President Clinton and its sudden (within weeks) reappearance under President George W. Bush.

Goldberg also cites Ben Wattenberg’s observation that 59 percent of reporters thought the “Contract with America” was an “election year gimmick,” while only 3 percent thought it was “serious.” That might have been fair during the election. But even after 70 percent of the Contract was enacted into law, the media continued to report that it had been abandoned. So, despite the first comprehensive welfare reform in 68 years, the first tax cuts in 17 years, the first increase in defense spending in more than a decade, the first four consecutive balanced budgets since the 1920s, we still had not, according to media observations, accomplished anything.

Goldberg quotes Peter Jennings on the 1994 election results: “Some thoughts on those angry voters. Ask parents of any two- year-old and they can tell you about those temper tantrums. . . . Imagine a nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage. The voters had a temper tantrum last week.” Now there’s an impartial analysis of an election in which nine million more Americans voted Republican than in 1990 (the largest one-party off-year increase in American history). Jennings was at least open in his contempt for what we were doing. The hard thing to deal with in so many of his colleagues is their pretense of professionalism.

One of the news channels or networks ought to give Goldberg a half hour every week to explore bias in the media. It would be a lively program. If he were as aggressive and risk-taking on air as he is in this book, it would be a very provocative show.