Yesterday was Rod Blagojevich's big day of spin and obfuscation on TV. Today that honor goes to Bernard Goldberg, a FOX news contributor, who will spend part of his day on FOX News hawking a book about Obama and the media. So, a book being hawked on FOX -- by Bernard Goldberg -- about Obama and the media -- you know that's got to be a real winner. Our friends at Media Matters for America actually read the book and fact-checked its content. Guess what they found? Goldberg's book has "falsehoods and red herrings":
In Chapter One, Goldberg cites as evidence of the media's "pro-Obama tilt" the fact that CBS' The Early Show ran a segment called "Five Things You Should Know About Barack Obama" that featured trivia about Obama. Of course, five days later, the show ran a segment called "Five Things You Should Know" about Sen. John McCain -- a fact Goldberg conveniently neglects to mention.Goldberg's book is titled, "A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (and Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media." Sounds like it's really just another slobbering and pathetic right wing smear job. So FOX is the perfect place for Goldberg and his book.
In another example of purported media infatuation with President Obama, Goldberg echoes Rush Limbaugh by printing badly doctored "snippets" of an interview between Charlie Rose and Tom Brokaw. Like his Early Show example, Goldberg's doctored transcript of the interview falsely suggests that comments Brokaw and Rose made about their lack of familiarity with the candidates applied only to Obama when, in fact, they were referring to McCain as well. It also falsely suggests that Brokaw expressed the view that "there's a lot about [Obama] we don't know," when, in fact, Brokaw attributed that assertion to "conservative commentators."
And, in a particularly striking example of mangling the facts, Goldberg writes, "Finally, in the last month of the campaign, the [New York] Times returned to the Obama-[William] Ayers story, but only after McCain and (mostly) [Gov. Sarah] Palin began making it an issue on the campaign trail." In fact, in what was reported as the "first time" Palin raised Obama's connection to Ayers, Palin actually cited the October 4, 2008, New York Times story to which Goldberg refers.
