Welcome to You, Bernie Goldberg, But You Need a Lot of Tutoring if You Plan to be a Conservative
       Bernie Goldberg is a former CBS News reporter who has written three best-selling books about the news media since 2002.
       The first, “Bias”, became the #1 book in America in 2002. The second, “Arrogance” was published only a year later in 2003. His newest book, “100 People Who Are Screwing Up America” is already a best-seller in 2005. 
       Goldberg is chiding liberals at the television networks to present “fair and balanced” programs. So why shouldn’t conservatives welcome Goldberg with open arms?
       They should!
       We do!! 
       Welcome Bernie Goldberg!!!
       But Bernie and his staff are obviously using MassNews as a prominent source for his newest book, and we feel compelled, as a friend, to point out some of the many problems in his new book which must be corrected if he is going to continue to have an impact.

       By MassNews Staff
       Bernie Goldberg’s “Arrogance” was published only a year after “Bias” went to the top of the New York Times list of best-selling books in 2002. In the last paragraph in “Arrogance,” Bernie strongly recommended that an illustrious CBS News correspondent during WWII and the fifties, Edward R. Murrow, be enshrined as our guiding-light. But Murrow always was a big liberal, so why is Bernie recommending that he be our source of inspiration?
       Here is the entire last paragraph in “Arrogance” where Bernie wrote why we should enshrine Murrow.
       “The media elites should use no one less than Edward R. Murrow, the legendary CBS News correspondent, as their guide. Back in the 1950s, when Senator Joe McCarthy was running rampant and threatening opponents with destruction – including Ed Murrow himself --- he [Murrow] did a memorable broadcast on the senator and his methods. ‘We are not descended from fearful men,’ Murrow said in his commentary at the end of the program, ‘not men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular. This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result.’”
That’s how Bernie ended his book “Arrogance.”

But Bernie, Your Guiding-Light Was a Huge Liberal Friend of the Sulzbergers, Public Enemy #1
       At the same time that Ed Murrow was speaking those words back in the 1950s, he was only following the leadership of the Sulzberger family and their New York Times, which was under the control of Pinch’s grandfather, Arthur H. Sulzberger, at that time.
       Murrow was doing what Arthur H. Sulzberger (the most powerful voice in the world) was telling him and the rest of the media to do. Bernie Goldberg may be startled to learn that Pinch Sulzberger, who Bernie has labeled as one of the “most dangerous” people in America, is the third Sulzberger to control the Times since they seized control in 1933-1935.
       In fact, Arthur H. Sulzberger, and Pinch’s grandmother, Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, in the 1950s, were still leading the huge left-turn they had made in the Times back in the 1930s when they took complete control of her father’s newspaper, which he, Adolph Ochs, had purchased in 1896.
          The question which the Sulzbergers had made “so important” in the 1930s was whether Communism was damaging to or beneficial to the United States (and the world). But instead of having that be the focal point of the debate after WWII, they made the messenger, Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), the only issue.
       Almost no one disputed after World War II that many important posts under Roosevelt were occupied by those who were sympathetic with Russia and the U.S. Communist Party. Under the influence of Iphigene and her husband,the Times had given, through the dispatches of reporter Walter Duranty in the early 1930s a rosy, false picture of Stalin’s Russia, by denying that many millions of farmers in the Ukraine (Russia’s bread-basket) were being starved to death in order to force them to submit to Stalin’s demands.
       After this ruse became readily apparent to everyone after WWII, the Sulzbergers led the attack against the messenger, Sen. McCarthy. They reported that the messenger drank too much, was crude, and would not be welcome at Sardi’s restaurant in New York City. They refused to discuss the true issues about Russia and Communism and continued their spotlight on the Senator.
       Even though the staff at the Times raved about a book in 1954 by William F. Buckley, Jr. which defended the Senator and his views, “McCarthy & His Enemies,” the Sulzbergers ignored the book and continued their attacks.
       The staff at the Times wrote: “This is the most extraordinary book yet to come forth in the harsh bibliography, pro and con, of ‘McCarthyism.’ Measured as a literary and polemical effort it is most striking ...”
       The book was reprinted forty years later (in 1995), but almost no student in college today would ever be assigned to read it. Instead, most shudder at the dangers of “McCarthyism.”
       We realize that Bernie was not born until 1945 but he can’t ignore recent history even if he was not yet on the scene when much of it occurred.  

Very Important Issue in Presidential Election Which Ike Won; Sulzberger Tried to Intimidate President
       This entire subject became a very important issue in the 1952 Presidential election. Arthur was doing something he had never done before, and about which the modern founder of the Times, Adolph Ochs, would definitely not approve. Arthur was entering directly into politics and secretly working for Dwight Eisenhower for President. The General was a moderate/liberal as opposed to Senator Robert Taft, who was leading the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Arthur had joined the President of IBM, Thomas J. Watson Jr., and other Columbia trustees to bring Eisenhower to head the University. In the fall of 1951, General Eisenhower was back in Europe, on leave from Columbia, in order to get European military commitment to NATO.
       Eisenhower met with President Truman over NATO matters in November 1951, and Truman invited him to run on the Democratic ticket, but Ike replied that he had been a lifelong Republican. The meeting was leaked to the Times by someone (Justice William O. Douglas took credit in his autobiography). The Times put the story on their front page.
       After that, Arthur wrote to Eisenhower that he had no qualms about using the Times to help “bridge the gap between your present post to that of a candidate.” He then asked his two political reporters, Arthur Krock and Scotty Reston, for a memo about Ike’s chances, which he sent to the General without their knowledge. Krock believed that the draft-Ike movement would never get off the ground without a statement from Ike. Reston admired the General’s refusal to jeopardize his NATO work and said if he waited until May when the job was over, he would strengthen his appeal.
       On January 6, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge made the General livid by announcing that he was entering him in the New Hampshire primary and forming an Eisenhower for President campaign. The ploy forced Eisenhower to announce the next day that he would accept the nomination if offered, and the Times announced on the same day that it would support Eisenhower “enthusiastically.” Never before had the paper endorsed a candidate before the convention, much less seven months before a Party’s convention and without even knowing who the Democrats would nominate. In the spring, the Times published a series of columns called, “Taft Can’t Win.”

Sulzberger’s Enthusiasm Began to Wane
       Sulzberger’s enthusiasm about Ike began to wane as he discovered that he could not control the General as he could other politicians, particularly on the issue of Communism and Senator McCarthy.
       Sulzberger believed that McCarthy had exploited the public’s fear of Communism with his accusations of treason in high places. He thought Ike was fearful of damaging his chances with pro-McCarthy voters, and therefore was unwilling to speak out against the deceit and demagoguery. But Ike sincerely believed that McCarthy was doing a public service in awakening the public to the dangers of Communists.
        According to a book which is an acclaimed history of the Times, Eisenhower told that to Sulzberger in private and not before a waving crowd. He thought that McCarthy deserved credit “for having awakened the country to some of its security problems.” (The book is “The Trust,” an official book commissioned by the Times itself and written by its former media reporter, Alex S. Jones and his wife, Susan Tifft.)  
       (At many places throughout the book, Tifft and Jones wrote much personal information about the Sulzbergers that would have embarrassed anyone, almost as though the authors hoped that someone like MassNews would publicize the destructive, evil part of the Sulzberger family.)
        Nevertheless, Sulzberger was “in despair” when Eisenhower agreed to appear with the Republican Senator in Wisconsin. Therefore, Ike agreed to say something nice about the liberal, General George Marshall at the same time. Based upon that, Arthur wrote an editorial for the morning after the appearance but the General had excised that part of his speech. “Do I need to tell you I am sick at heart?” Arthur cabled Sherman Adams, Ike’s personal aide. Arthur added that he was “close to physically ill.”
       The editor of the Editorial Page, John Oakes (who was Punch’s older cousin and later fired by Punch) also withdrew his support for Ike. Most of the staff was for Adlai Stevenson, including Iphigene, but Arthur kept a lukewarm support for Ike. Arthur could not see that it was his failure to keep the Times a newspaper-of-record and not his own, personal journal, that had caused his embarrassment over the editorial.
       In January 1953, the month when President Eisenhower was inaugurated, columnist Walter Winchell reported that an undercover government agent, Harvey M. Matusow, had told Congress there were 500 dues-paying Communists working in newspapers, of which 100 were at the Times. Arthur tried to get the details through the head of the FBI (J. Edgar Hoover) twice and then managed to contact Matusow directly, who finally gave a reporter in Los Angeles a two-day interview and signed an affidavit attesting to its truth. Matusow repeated the charge against the Times but said he knew only six there. McCarthy was aware that Matusow had made up most of his allegations, at least so Matusow claimed. Arthur was timid about running the story and sent it to J. Edgar Hoover,who was outraged and quickly returned it, saying, “I could never, under any circumstances, attempt to influence any columnist or writer.”
       By the end of 1954, the Democrats had regained control of Congress, and McCarthy was censured in the Senate by a vote of 65-22. All the Southerners, who were mostly Democrats at the time, voted to censure McCarthy. That was the end of his investigating career. Senator James O. Eastland (D-Mississippi) of the Internal Security Subcommittee then took charge. According to Tifft and Jones, he did so mainly because he was angry at Times editorials demanding that Mississippi immediately desegregate its schools.

Times Became Defiant
       Tifft and Jones say that “the assault on the Times began in earnest”when Walter Winchell (a prominent journalist) alleged that the Times reporter who was covering Senator McCarthy for the paper, Clayton Knowles, was a former member of the Communist Party for six years while he was a reporter at the Long Island Daily Press but he had quit when he joined the Times in 1943.
       It turned out that Winchell was correct. One of the persons at the Times who was reporting about McCarthy had been a Communist member (although he now claimed he no longer belonged to the Party). His true nature at this point was difficult to divine, but it was obvious to almost everyone that he could not continue to cover the Senator. Was he merely a misguided idealist who had hidden his past when he started at the Times in 1943? Arthur removed him from the Washington bureau and brought him back to New York where he labored in low jobs for the rest of his career, pitied by some and scorned by others, for not only confessing but also naming others who had been in the Party.
       When a copy editor at the Times took the Fifth Amendment before Senator Eastland’s committee, saying only that he had not been a Communist since 1942, Arthur fired him, saying his lack of cooperation had caused the paper to “lose confidence” in him.
       In early December, Eastland’s committee held four days of closed hearings in New York City to probe the Communist influence in newspapers.Thirty of the subpoenaed witnesses were currently or formerly employees of the Times. After that Eastland announced he would be holding open hearings in Washington in the first week of 1955. When their employees began receiving subpoenas, “a new air of defiance made itself apparent at the paper,” say Tifft and Jones, as the editorial staff believed that “McCarthyism” continued even though the Senator himself had been silenced.
       On the first day of the hearings, Arthur succumbed to the belief of his staff that the Times had been singled-out. He agreed to run an editorial which had been written in case it was needed. Tifft and Jones say:“Painstakingly, the editorial made its case and slowly gathered speed and power, like a preacher warming to his sermon. By the end it became a clarion call, and in the final sentences Merz [the author] soared.”
       Those final sentences in the editorial were: “[I]f further evidence reveals that the real purpose of the present inquiry is to demonstrate that a free newspaper’s policies can be swayed by Congressional pressure, then we say to Mr. Eastland and his counsel that they are wasting their time. This newspaper will continue to determine its policies. It will continue to condemn discrimination, whether in the South or in the North. It will continue to defend civil liberties. It will continue to challenge the unbridled power of governmental authority. It will continue to enlist goodwill against prejudice and confidence against fear. We cannot speak unequivocally for the long future. But we can have faith. And our faith is strong that long after Senator Eastland and his present subcommittee are forgotten, long after segregation has lost its final battle in the South, long after all that was known as McCarthyism is a dim, unwelcome memory, long after the last Congressional committee has learned that it cannot tamper successfully with a free press, The New York Times will still be speaking for the men who make it, and only for the men who make it, and speaking, without fear or favor, the truth as it sees it.”
       But the 35,000 ordinary American families who had just seen their sons drafted from their homes and sent to Korea at the urging of the Times and other liberals and killed by the Communist armies of China and North Korea were left wondering what the elite at the Times (whose children were married or “perpetually” in college and hence not eligible for the draft), knew about it. Those ordinary families would continue to worry whether those in Washington were helping or hurting the boys who were forced to do the fighting.
       Meanwhile, Punch Sulzberger was safely back home after playing Marine in his new Lieutenant’s uniform just as he did in World War II and as his father had done at the end of World War I.
       As for Eisenhower, he is reported to have told John Foster Dulles that the Times was “the most untrustworthy newspaper in the United States.”