Weapons of Mass Distortion: The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media
by Brent Bozell

Over the past twenty years, no single American has done more to expose left-wing media bias than Brent Bozell, founder and animating spirit of the Media Research Center. Big Media is a dinosaur of a target. In Weapons of Mass Distortion: The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media, Bozell presents an amazing array of evidence proving that liberal bias permeates the media.

He details a wonderful exchange on the Today show. Bryant Gumbel introduces an environmental segment by asking his roundtable, "At the risk of starting an argument, do you believe in global warming?" He then polls the roundtable, and surprise! everybody fervently agrees with him that, yes, global warming is a fact. No danger of disagreement here.

Here's Michael Weisskopf in the Washington Post describing supporters of Jerry Falwell: "largely poor, uneducated and easy to command." Some might apply those adjectives to segments of the Democratic base, but don't expect to hear that opinion voiced on the nightly news.

Bozell reminds us that the self-righteous media were possibly the cause of the Florida debacle in the 2000 election; in story after story it was reported that the polls were closed at 7:00 eastern time - resulting in a near desertion of the polls in the Florida Panhandle, which is in the central time zone. Convincing anecdotal evidence from the polls shows the confusion that this consistently misreported "fact" had in western, pro-Bush precincts.

Gay rights have become yet another cause to be sold, rather than a story to be reported. Here's Richard Berke, openly gay no. 2 reporter in the New York Times' Washington, D.C. office: "There are times when you look at the front-page meeting [at the Times]…and literally three-quarters of the people deciding what's on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals."

That may explain why the New York Times printed 45 stories about Mathew Shepard's murder by two heterosexuals, but not a single story about the horrific murder of Jesse Dirkhising by two openly gay men. A Nexis search of the national media shows 3,007 stories about Shepard in the month after his death, but only 46 about Dirkhising.

On issue after issue, Big Old Media has dictated a liberal-to-loony-left position that it defends with all its might. But Bozell believes the sun is setting on the old empire. Talk radio and Fox News are making heavy inroads. Dan Rather's recent debacle at CBS proves Bozell's point: Americans want facts, not ideology disguised as facts.

(Crown Forum, 2004, 263 pages, $25.95)