Bias?

Many have been offering their opinions on the Rathergate Report CBS released yesterday. Many have been referring to the results of the Thomburgh-Boccardi investigation as a whitewash for several reasons, the primarily one being, "The panel does not find a basis to accuse those who investigated, produced, vetted or aired the Segment of having political bias."

How can that be? I see it and so do you. Because it's so obvious, why don't they just admit it? Why won't they?

Perhaps they can't. Consider this:

The media elites can float through their personal lives and rarely run into someone with an opposing view. This is very unhealthy and sometimes downright ridiculous, as when Pauline Kael, for years the brilliant film critic at the New Yorker, was completely baffled about how Richard Nixon could have beaten George McGovern in 1972: "Nobody I know voted for Nixon." Never mind that Nixon carried forty-nine states. She wasn't kidding. — Bernard Goldberg, On Media Bias, Network Stars are Rather Clueless, Wall Street Journal, May 24, 2001.

The independent counsel reported it could "not find a basis" for an accusation of bias. In their own insular world in which everyone around them thinks the same way they do, the MSM simply thought their views reflected mainstream America's?

Goldberg put it another way in his #1 New York Times Bestseller, BIAS: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News:

No conspiracies. No deliberate attempts to slant the news. It just happens. . . [b]ecause [of] the way reporters and editors see the world.

What about the "independent" counsel, then? (And yes, those are sneer quotes.) How does that affect them?

Tell me, pa-leeze, how it would be possible for an investigative body to even recognize bias, when it's comprised of people who travel only in their own elite circle, the same one as those they are charged with investigating.

I have to disagree with the much (HUGELY) larger blogs that were directly involved in Rathergate or have been reporting on it from the start, that the "independent" counsel's report is nothing more than a whitewash.

Whitewash doesn't exist in the world of the blind.
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Goldberg was pulled off the air in 1996 by "The Dan" after writing an editorial for the WSJ on biased reporting by the major networks. After BIAS, Goldberg's next NYT bestseller, again on media bias, was titled Arrogance.

Bingo.