An equally meretricious and huge bestseller was Bernard Goldberg's Bias, the work of a disgruntled former CBS correspondent. Leaving aside Goldberg's evident grudge against his old colleagues, his claims about liberal slanting on the networks and in newspapers were swiftly exploded by more careful researchers. His central "proof- of bias is that conservatives are more often labeled in the media than liberals "because journalists regard liberalism as normal and conservatism as deviant. Typically, Goldberg offered no research to confirm this observation.
Put to the empirical test by Geoffrey Nunberg, a Stanford professor of linguistics and research scientist, Goldberg's assertions proved to be totally false as far as major newspapers are concerned. Using a database that includes the twenty top American daily newspapers, Nunberg tested the Bias hypothesis with the names of ten "well-known politicians, five liberals and five conservatives."" To his surprise he found that the average liberal had "a better than 30 percent greater likelihood of being given a political label than the average conservative does."" Barney Frank, the gay Democrat from suburban Boston, was called liberal more than twice as frequently as Dick Armey, the fundamentalist Republican from suburban Dallas (who once called Frank "Barney Fag- on the House floor) was labeled conservative.
Goldberg also insists that conservative celebrities, such as Tom Selleck and Bruce Willis, are labeled more often than their liberal counterparts. Again Nunberg found him to be completely wrong. Barbra Streisand and Rob Reiner were identified by their ideology four times more often than Selleck or Willis.
The Stanford professor did some additional research on his own. "In the newspapers I looked at,"" he wrote in The American Prospect, "the word 'media' appears within seven words of liberal bias' 469 times and within seven words of conservative bias' just 17 times "a twenty-seven-fold discrepancy.
