Friday, March 26, 2004
Arrogance: A Book Review
Right now I'm reading Bernie Goldberg's new book Arrogance: Rescuing America From The Media Elite.
The bottom line: I'm wasting my time reading this book so that you don't have to.
His prior book, Bias, was sloppy and disappointing. It should have been a tour de force--a scintillating expose of the coastal and left-wing biases and prejudices of America's fourth estate. Instead we got a dull and tedious tell-all about how CBS's Don Hewitt is a liberal democrat, who once gave short shrift to Steve Forbes' flat-tax proposal.
Goldberg should have chosen the subtitle: "Saving America from the Media Conspiracy Against Me Me Me."
Arrogance falls into much the same trap, although to a lesser degree.
See, there ought to be plenty to write about. Too much of America's opinion-making power is concentrated into New York City and Washington D.C. All three networks (four counting FOX), CNN, MSNBC, Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal must all draw their staffs from the demographic pools of just two cities, and so it's only natural that their editorial staffs would share the political views commonly held by this coastal demographic.
So there is enough out there to fill a lively and entertaining book to be written about the "snoot factor" endemic to the New York media scene. The problem is, Anne Coulter already wrote it.
Arrogance breaks little new ground--and indeed draws upon many of the exact same anecdotes, by way of supporting evidence, that Coulter describes in Slander. But he does so without Coulter's end note documentation, nor her ascerbic touch for satire.
Imagine a bitter and more self-absorbed Anne Coulter. Subtract a few IQ points. Dilute out her outrageous hyperbole.
Now imagine her without a sense of humor.
That's Goldberg's new book.
ZZZZzzzzzzzzz.
The real crime is that the gang at Warner Books didn't expect better out of a veteran journalist. At a minimum, they should have insisted on end notes, and edited out every single one of Goldberg's "misunderstood and mistreated me" anecdotes.
I guess when you've got a ready-made and easily targeted book-buying demographic, and you can guarantee selling 100,000 copies to the same echo-chamber inhabitants who bought Coulter's last book, and everything else the ad sponsors of the G. Gordon Liddy radio show tell them to read, you can get away with publishing schlock.
Splash, out
Jason
The bottom line: I'm wasting my time reading this book so that you don't have to.
His prior book, Bias, was sloppy and disappointing. It should have been a tour de force--a scintillating expose of the coastal and left-wing biases and prejudices of America's fourth estate. Instead we got a dull and tedious tell-all about how CBS's Don Hewitt is
Goldberg should have chosen the subtitle: "Saving America from the Media Conspiracy Against Me Me Me."
Arrogance falls into much the same trap, although to a lesser degree.
See, there ought to be plenty to write about. Too much of America's opinion-making power is concentrated into New York City and Washington D.C. All three networks (four counting FOX), CNN, MSNBC, Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal must all draw their staffs from the demographic pools of just two cities, and so it's only natural that their editorial staffs would share the political views commonly held by this coastal demographic.
So there is enough out there to fill a lively and entertaining book to be written about the "snoot factor" endemic to the New York media scene. The problem is, Anne Coulter already wrote it.
Arrogance breaks little new ground--and indeed draws upon many of the exact same anecdotes, by way of supporting evidence, that Coulter describes in Slander. But he does so without Coulter's end note documentation, nor her ascerbic touch for satire.
Imagine a bitter and more self-absorbed Anne Coulter. Subtract a few IQ points. Dilute out her outrageous hyperbole.
Now imagine her without a sense of humor.
That's Goldberg's new book.
ZZZZzzzzzzzzz.
The real crime is that the gang at Warner Books didn't expect better out of a veteran journalist. At a minimum, they should have insisted on end notes, and edited out every single one of Goldberg's "misunderstood and mistreated me" anecdotes.
I guess when you've got a ready-made and easily targeted book-buying demographic, and you can guarantee selling 100,000 copies to the same echo-chamber inhabitants who bought Coulter's last book, and everything else the ad sponsors of the G. Gordon Liddy radio show tell them to read, you can get away with publishing schlock.
Splash, out
Jason
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