An echo chamber of his own: Bernie Goldberg's new niche is a little too comfortable.

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America - Book Review

BERNARD GOLDBERG USED to be a gadfly. In 1996, as a CBS News correspondent, he made a splash with a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece titled "Networks Need a Reality Check: A firsthand account of liberal bias at CBS News." Goldberg's colleagues were furious, and though he kept his job he reportedly became something of a pariah.

After cutting his ties to CBS in 2000, Goldberg became a reporter for the HBO program Real Sports while forging a second career as a crusader against liberal media bias and other cultural ills, with three bestsellers under his belt. In that capacity, Goldberg has made some valuable points, but he has also shown some pretty blatant biases of his own.

Goldberg's first book, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, came out in 2001 to an enthusiastic reception from conservatives and shrill denunciations from liberals, often replete with personal attacks. Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales, writing in the journal Electronic Media, called Goldberg a "disgruntled has-been" who couldn't cut it at CBS because of his "disheveled and bleary-eyed" appearance--never mind the seven Emmys he had won for his work in broadcasting. The book invited such attacks with its over-the-top ranting and its heavy close of personal rancor, but it also made a fairly strong case.

Most notably, Goldberg asserted that most journalists in the mainstream media live in such an insular world that they mistake their own ideology, shared by virtually everyone around them, for objective reality. Hence the tendency to identify conservatives as conservatives but liberals as simply "a columnist" or "a law professor." This claim about ideological labeling was strongly challenged in The American Prospect by the Stanford linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, but Nunberg's findings may have been skewed by use of a limited news database and by lumping together news stories and opinion columns. When the Stanford political scientist David Brady and his assistant Jonathan Ma closely examined news stories only, they found that The New York Times and The Washington Post "labeled" conservative members of Congress nearly three times as often as liberal ones, with similar trends in the Los Angeles Times and USA Today.

Some of Goldberg's charges of bias were exaggerated or even baseless, such as his contention that the liberal media largely stopped covering homelessness in the Clinton years but put it back on the radar screen as soon as a Republican was back in...