High Bias
Andrew Sullivan has been doing a brilliant job rebutting liberal media folks who pooh-pooh Bernard Goldberg's best-selling book, "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News." We particularly like this exchange, which Sullivan found in the Dec. 18 transcript of CNN's "Newsnight With Aaron Brown":

Brown: Some conservatives jumped on [John] Walker, saying he is a product of cultural liberalism--the California kind--helping to turn an impressionable kid against his own country.

Joining us from Salinas, California, one of those conservatives, Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institution. Mr. Steele wrote a provocative article the other day in The Wall Street Journal--a column in the Journal.

And here in New York, a columnist who thinks Mr. Steele is making an awfully broad generalization. Richard Cohen of the Washington Post. It's nice to have both of you here. Mr. Steele.

Steele: First of all, let me interrupt you just a minute.

Brown: OK.

Steele: Is Richard Cohen a liberal?

Brown: Yeah, Richard Cohen's a liberal. I think he would say that, wouldn't he? . . .

Cohen: On this issue.

Brown: On this issue. OK. Everyone is now branded, I guess.

Steele: OK. Great.

Brown: Now let me try . . .

Steele: If I'm going to be, everybody is going to be.

Of course no one suggests Brown is deliberately being unfair, but this does seem to be an indisputable example of the kind of unthinking bias about which Goldberg writes.