Bernard Goldberg, whose book Bias, a zippy, blunt and highly controversial blast-fest at the news biz and his old employer CBS, looks like he’s about to hit paydirt again with a new one: 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America.
First off, Goldberg clearly writes from a conservative-anchored perspective — but that doesn’t make his books less provocative (or fun) to read, whether you’re a liberal or a moderate. But you can see by this list run in the Seatte Times that his top 10 do reflect a certain….ahem…bias:
1. Michael Moore, filmmaker
2. Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times
3. Ted Kennedy, Democratic U.S. senator, Massachusetts
4. Jesse Jackson, Democratic African-American activist
5. Anthony Romero, American Civil Liberties Union’s executive director
6. Jimmy Carter, former Democratic president
7. Margaret Marshall, chief justice, Massachusetts state Supreme Court
8. Paul Krugman, columnist at The New York Times
9. Jonathan Kozol, education scholar and author
10. Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way
Tom DeLay isn’t in there somewhere? 50 Cent (you haven’t LIVED until you’ve heard a 12 year old recite 50 C’s rap lyrics)?
It’ll be interesting to see when we read the book if everyone listed belongs to a certain party with a D or with the letters RINO. We suspect they are mostly from one party and ideology. So you’ll hear great hype about it on radio and television talk shows. This isn’t a coincidence: from a marketing standpoint, a book that appeals to the conservative market has an extensive marketing apparatus that can sell huge quantities of material. So Golberg’s book is the ulimate Red Meat collection for partisans.
Who do YOU think should be on a list of a less ideological exclusive Top 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America? (We mean, besides TMV). And WHY?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.