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Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes
How the Media Distort the News
Bernard Goldberg
Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2002
The migration of thoughtful individuals from the Left to the Right has been going on for many years. In the 1930s, it occurred as one after another came eventually to "hear the screams" from Communist cellars. Most of the brilliant coterie of intellectuals who came to surround William F. Buckley at the newly-founded National Review in the years after World War II had traveled the entire distance from Communism to an articulate conservatism. Among those making the migration were John Dos Passos, Max Eastman, Whittaker Chambers, Frank Meyer, Eugene Lyons, James Burnham, Freda Utley, and Willmoore Kendall, to mention a few. Philip Abbott Luce, Peter Collier and David Horowitz later made the transition from New Left militant to outspoken critic of the far Left.
Others who have made the migration from Left to Right have not so fully completed the journey, but have instead stayed somewhere on the left. Sidney Hook is perhaps the best example. Although he became a leading anti-Communist, his transition was to democratic socialism.
Now, shortly after the turn of the century, it is noteworthy that three books have appeared in rapid succession in which the authors give testimony to their having, after years of acceptance, seen chinks in the armor of the ideological hegemony, known generally as "political correctness," that prevails among the intelligentsia and the political and professional leadership in both Europe and America. But in each case the migration has been only part of the way, since all three have continued to embrace many tenets of the intellectual milieu from which they came.
One of these is Harry Stein, whose book How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right- Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace) was reviewed in these pages in the Winter 2001 issue. He has long been a columnist, book-writer, and free-lance contributor to several media.
Another is William McGowan, author of the recent book Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism. McGowan, a journalist, has been a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His book cites chapter and verse about how the ideologically partisan drive for multiculturalism has distorted the American press, weaning it away from...