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Brock, David and Ari Rabin-Havt. The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine. New York: Anchor Books, 2012. 329 pp. $15.
It's easy to find at least 300 titles on Amazon Books arguing the media are biased in one way or another. Many deal with liberal bias and its mirror image, conservative bias. But others fault the press on other fronts: bias in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, anti-Christian bias, anti-family bias, anti-gay or pro-homosexual bias, bias against female candidates for political office, bias against the poor, bias against guns, and even media bias against pit bull terriers. The long list supports the truism that bias is in the eye of the beholder. People tend to view the media from the perspective of their own biases. Nowhere is this notion more pronounced than in the political arena.
Conservatives have long maintained that the media have a liberal bias, while liberals see just the opposite. Both sides try to bolster their case in the strongest terms: from emotional arguments to rational explanations. But the most appealing evidence - to both sides - is real-world illustrations. Both liberals and conservatives try to prove media bias by flaunting egregious examples. Bernard Goldberg raised...