‘Bias’ author Goldberg speaks at debut lecture (Photo by John Schreiber, The Daily Campus)

Bernard Goldberg, former CBS producer and author of the bestseller Bias shared his thoughts on the media’s distortion of the news to the SMU community Monday during the inaugural William O’Neil Lecture.

A crowd of journalism and business students and faculty gathered in the Crum Auditorium of the Collins Executive Center to listen as Goldberg criticized the liberal bias that exists in the media today.

“Many of these journalists live in a comfy, elite liberal bubble inside New York or Washington,” Goldberg said. “Conservatives inside the bubble are seen as aliens and liberals are not seen as liberal at all but as mainstream.”

Goldberg repeatedly said the base of all problems in the news industry are because journalists refuse to step out of their own bubble to hear different perspectives.

Goldberg proposed initiatives to help prevent bias in the news and suggested more diversity among journalists would provide a more fair and balanced media. “There’s a solution to this-[journalists and media elite] have to get out of the bubble,” he said. “If they would meet people who had different views on important issues-that would be very good for the journalists.”

He mentioned that NBC’s Tim Russert has hired students from Catholic university’s to bring in a more conservative balance to his staff. Goldberg suggested that such hirings do more to bring diverse views to the newsroom.

Goldberg believes that the importance of the nightly news broadcast on the major networks is diminishing. He mentioned that ratings for all of the newscasts have been dropping since the 1980s.

When asked about what role Fox News has in the journalism universe, he said that it’s hard to deny that it is a conservative voice in the news industry. But Goldberg said most of their conservative voices come from their talk shows — not their news programming.

Goldberg, who previously worked as a CBS news correspondent for 28 years, said, “nothing I’ve said in my books is an attack on liberal values but it is an attack on liberal bias in the news.”

Andrea Chilcote, an SMU senior in attendance said, “I never really knew there was so much bias in the news but he used a lot of examples and justified what he said. I agree with some liberal and some conservative views but I think the news should be accurate.”

SMU senior, Aditi Shivapurkar, who has read Goldberg’s Bias said, “I consider myself liberal but I still agree that there is a liberal bias in the news. In his book he uses many examples and he backs up his argument. I thought it was really interesting.”

Goldberg ended his lecture by saying what our country needs today is a “strong independent tough press-if [journalists] don’t start to listen to ordinary Americans then they will become less and less relevant.”

Goldberg, one of the most distinguished voices in the media, has won seven Emmy awards during his career and is currently a correspondent for the HBO program Real Sports. “He is a chronicler of the changes in American culture, documenting everything from how our mannerisms have declined to the importance of sports in our culture,” said Belo Distinguished Chair in Journalism Tony Pederson.

With his best-selling book Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, Goldberg set off a national debate involving the media and the public. In addition, he has also written Arrogance, another best-seller criticizing the media, and more recently, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken is #37).