Last week, veteran CBS News reporter Bernard Goldberg spoke with the Center for Individual Freedom’s Renee Giachino, who hosts the radio talk show "Your Turn — Meeting Nonsense with Common Sense" on WEBY 1330 AM in Northwest Florida, about his bestselling books Bias and Arrogance.

What follows are excerpts from the interview.

GIACHINO: My first guest this afternoon is a gentleman who has spent time in many of your living rooms — figuratively speaking, of course. It is my extreme pleasure to introduce someone who needs little introduction. On the line, I have veteran CBS News reporter and producer, and most recently New York Times bestselling author Bernard Goldberg, to discuss his books Bias and Arrogance.

Mr. Goldberg, are you there?

GOLDBERG: I am here. Call me Bernie, and the pleasure is all mine.

GIACHINO: Thank you Bernie, and thank you so much for joining us. I’d like to begin by thanking you as well for having the courage to write the books Bias and Arrogance. For the benefit of the listeners who aren’t familiar with these books, what I will call "must-read books," I’d like to take just a short minute of your time if I may, Bernie, and sum up the books for them.

GOLDBERG: Sure.

GIACHINO: In Bias, Mr. Goldberg breaks rank and the media elite’s code of silence to write about the liberal bias that exists in the media world. The subtitle of Bias states that "A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News." And in his new book, Arrogance, Mr. Goldberg shines the camera lights even brighter on big journalism and its addiction to liberal bias. And that book’s subtitle reads: "Rescuing America from the Media Elite."

The impetus for both these books, I think, is the op-ed that you wrote for the Wall Street Journal on February 14, 1996, is that right, Bernie?

GOLDBERG: That’s correct.

GIACHINO: Okay, if I may, I would like to read just a short paragraph from that to set this up for our listeners. In a February 1996 op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal Mr. Goldberg wrote: "There are lots of reasons fewer people are watching network news, and one of them, I’m more convinced than ever, is that our viewers simply don’t trust us. And for good reason. The old argument that the networks and other ‘media elites’ have a liberal bias is so blatantly true that it’s hardly worth discussing anymore. No, we don’t sit around in dark corners and plan strategies on how we’re going to slant the news. We don’t have to. It comes naturally to most reporters."

Bernie, your definition of liberal bias is somewhat different from what I think most of the listeners would conjure up.

GOLDBERG: Right.

GIACHINO: What I thought it would be about is a partisan divide of Republican vs. Democrat.

GOLDBERG: Right.

GIACHINO: That is, until I read the book, I really didn’t understand that you meant something much different. Can you please educate the listeners about what you really mean in your books by the phrase "liberal bias"?

GOLDBERG: Well, I make two points on that, I think. One is that I worked at CBS News for 28 years so it is not a matter of what I think. I know that there is no conspiracy, despite what some people may think. Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, the guys who run The New York Times, they don’t come in in the morning, go into their offices and shut out the lights and summon their top lieutenants and give them the secret handshake and give them the secret salute and say "how are we going to stick it to those conservatives today." I wish it did happen that way because that is so unacceptable that nobody could tolerate that. What happens is worse.

These guys, media elites, live in an elite, comfortable, liberal bubble, in places like Manhattan in New York. They can go for a week, a day, a month, a year, they can practically go a whole lifetime and never run into anybody who has a different point of view than they have on all the big social issues, whether its gay marriage or affirmative action or abortion or other race issues or feminist issues. After a while, a kind of group think takes over. They think everything to the right is conservative, which it is, and everything to the left is middle of the road. They don’t even notice. These people are so in the dark they don’t even know that their views on these controversial subjects are liberal. They think they are just reasonable and civilized because all their pals inside the bubble have these same views. So, that’s one point that I make.

The second point that I make is that liberal bias in the news is mainly not about politics. These guys would go after their liberal grandmother if they thought it would help their career. It’s mostly about how they see the world. How they see the issues that I just mentioned. How they see gay marriage. How they see affirmative action. How they see abortion. And, if you see these issues a certain way, because, as I say, all your pals in the bubble see these issues the same way, you’re going to report on these issues the same way and that kind of reporting turns out to be liberally biased reporting. Not intentional. Not a conspiracy. It’s just the way these people are.

GIACHINO: Well you indicated in Bias that you acknowledge that the problem may actually be that the big ones, the Dans and the Peters, don’t even know what liberal bias is.

GOLDBERG: Yeah, I don’t think that they do.

GIACHINO: Do you think that they have read your books? Either one of them.

GOLDBERG (laughing): No. As a matter of fact, Dan Rather’s comment on all of this is "no comment." Brokaw and Jennings both say, along with about 50 other media elites, that this is ridiculous, that there is no liberal bias. And one CBS News correspondent told a friend of mine, this was right after Bias came out, the first book, my friend asked "Why do you think Bias is so successful?" And the correspondent said "because of all those right wing nuts out there."

See, that’s what they think of the people listening to us right now. I’ve been up in the Panhandle of Florida. I live in Florida. I live at the other end of the State. These are decent, good people, but they are seen by the media elites as a bunch of right wing nuts because many of them are good, decent, conservative people. That’s what I don’t like about these [media] people. I don’t care what kind of view they might have in their private lives, I don’t care what Dan thinks about anything, but I don’t like this kind of condescension towards people who live between Manhattan and Malibu. You know there is a country between Manhattan and Malibu. It’s called the United States of America.

GIACHINO: Well I don’t think they realize that there are people who watch television and read newspapers who live in between Manhattan and Malibu.

In addition to the biases that exist, Bernie, I have had the experience with reporters that I really sometimes think they are not even interested in understanding various points of view. They really only want you to provide them with some provocative sound bite.

GOLDBERG: Yes, that’s true.

GIACHINO: Do you think this is simply a reflection of the business realities of journalism, what we have become with too few reporters chasing too many stories, or does it reflect a deeper cynicism?

GOLDBERG: I think the nature of bias, any kind of bias, is a preconceived notion about something, whether it’s racial bias or media bias or any kind of bias — bias toward a certain kind of car. It’s like you go into it with your mind pretty much made up. So when they call and they want a sound bite and you say that they are not even listening to what you are saying, you’re right. It’s because they have already made their mind up about what they are calling you about, and they just need you to fill in some blank.

So when reporters go out and cover stories on these big hot social issues, they don’t go out to learn what this side thinks and what that side thinks. They already have their take on these issues, and their take is overwhelmingly a liberal take on these issues. And then they go out and they interview somebody and they put that person in and, well, let’s put it this way, the conservative point of view is very often the other side of the argument. There is a main side and an other side. The main side in affirmative action, for instance, is that affirmative action is a wonderful thing. The main side in gay marriage is who would be against gay marriage except some bigot. And then they go out and they find that other side. Because otherwise it would be so blatantly biased that they couldn’t get away with it.

But they do go into these stories with their minds, if not totally made up, tilting in a sort of leftward direction.

GIACHINO: I think in Bias you make a very argument, and I really had not focused on this until I read the book, that very often they don’t go in search of the other side. For example, when Congress votes on a women’s rights issue, they go to NOW.

GOLDBERG: Yes. When Congress votes on an issue or the Supreme Court votes on an issue that affects women directly they go to the National Organization for Women, and you know what, good. That is a group that should be heard from. And when they do, they almost never, and I mean almost never — and I am only saying almost because it is 99% of the time — they don’t identify NOW as a liberal women’s group, which of course it is.

GIACHINO: You’re right. But as you point out in your books, they would be quick to tell you the other side.

GOLDBERG: You’re right. On the rare occasion that they go to the other side, say Concerned Women for America, which is easy to get to as they are also in Washington, D.C., as is NOW, they almost never go to that side. But the few times that they do, they almost always identify them as a conservative women’s group. You know the conservative label to the media elites is like the label on a pack of cigarettes — it’s a hazardous to your health warning label. The reason they identify conservatives far more than a liberal is that they think conservatives are out of the mainstream and need to be identified. They need to warn the audience that this person you are about to hear from is a conservative. But they don’t identify liberals because they think liberals are the mainstream. They don’t think liberals are liberal, they think liberals are the mainstream. And once you think that, everything you think after that is going to be bias.

GIACHINO: Well, let me get back to the whole issue of what they see and what they don’t see because in your books you make reference to how the Peters and the Dans and the Toms of the world say that "bias is very largely in the eye of the beholder." I know that, at least for me, your books have opened up my eyes, and probably lots of people’s eyes, to how deep that bias really runs.

GOLDBERG: That’s what the second book Arrogance really does. It shows how entrenched the biases are, how it perpetuates itself.

GIACHINO: This is my question: Do you think that the liberal bias is to credit or blame — I guess, depending on who you ask and your perspective — for the popularity of the political pundit television and radio talk shows, including Rush and O’Reilly? I know Rush has been around a long time, but his popularity, I am sure, has increased since your books have come out.

GOLDBERG: I have told Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel that he needs to send a case of champagne each to Dan Rather and Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw with a little note saying "thank you for sending over all those viewers." Because, if the American people had more trust in the mainstream media, if they believed them more, if they didn’t think they were biased, if they agreed with them more than they agreed with me, there’d be no need for the Fox News Channel. Rush would still be out there, but there would be no need for a whole bunch of other conservative places that you can get your news these days. Whether it’s the Internet or talk radio or cable or satellite TV, there would be no need for that if people had more trust in Brokaw, Rather and Jennings. I mean, I think the success of conservative media is the direct result of the lack of trust with the liberal media.

GIACHINO: Bernie, I know the books are available at our local bookstores. Do you know if they are still available on Amazon.com?

GOLDBERG: Well, I know that Arrogance is no longer on the "just released" list but you can go online and get it with that 30% discount right away or get it locally.

GIACHINO: I know I found it right away when I walked in. Which I think is critically important, and let me explain why. I cannot emphasize enough to the listeners how vital I think it is to read these books, particularly in an election year. Recently, I was traveling cross-country with my family and I actually read your books aloud to my husband while the kids enjoyed movies in the back seat —thank goodness for cordless headphones! And my husband, who is extremely patriotic, having served our country in the U.S. Navy (and he votes regularly, but doesn’t necessarily consider himself really actively involved in politics), he was somewhat shocked at some of the things that you uncover in your books and somewhat disgusted — I think that’s the best way to describe it — when he watched with me the Democratic convention and heard the speeches of Hillary Rodham Clinton and former President Bill Clinton. And this is the point I am trying to make for the listeners is that if you read these books and you listen to the speeches and you read your newspaper, Bernie Goldberg is dead-on on this stuff. It was as if their speech-writers had a copy of your books in hand when they wrote the speeches. They hit every liberal issue that you write about in Bias — from AIDS to racial issues to women’s rights. And after reading the books, I think even I could have written the speeches for them. My question is: Who was their real audience do you think? Was the audience the media, or do you think it was the American public?

GOLDBERG: Well, unfortunately for them, there was not much of an audience, period. These were the worst ratings for a convention I think in history. I mean, literally, in history. So they did not have much of an audience. I think part of that is that just about everybody already has his or her mind made up in this election. There are very few undecided. And I think other people just decided they did not want to watch it. They did watch it on cable though. There was not point in watching the networks, which ran about an hour a night for three of the four nights. So they were aiming at the American people, the undecided, they were trying to get them over to their column. I think that’s the best answer I can give you.

By the way, when you said before that it was almost as if you wrote the speeches, I want to make clear that you probably did not mean it quite that way. What I did was I pointed out everything that these guys do. I mean, I understand the mentality of how these people on the left think about these things and how the media thinks about these things. But I in no way helped either party write its stuff or anything like that. I know you didn’t mean it like that.

GIACHINO: No, my point was that I could have written the speeches after having read your books. That was my point. That anybody who has read the books could have anticipated the issues that they were going to talk about.

GOLDBERG: Well, and you know there is another thing after you read the books. You know how you don’t want to watch sausage being made and then eat it. If you read Arrogance, let’s say, you’re not going to be able to watch the evening news ever again the same way because you’re going to see every little trick that these guys pull.

GIACHINO (laughing): Well, I do think it ruins it for you in some respects.

GOLDBERG: I think millions and millions of Americans have literally turned off the evening news. It has already been ruined by people like Rather, Brokaw and Jennings, and I think what Arrogance does and what Bias did before it, it gives you — I mean I was a correspondent there for 28 years — it gives you that behind the scenes look at how they look at these things. Like when you hear an anchorman use the term "controversial" all you can be sure is that what is coming out of his mouth after that is something that he disagrees with. When a report comes out that they agree with, it is not controversial. When a report comes out that they disagree with, all of a sudden it is controversial.

GIACHINO: Going back to the Democratic convention — I just want to drop a footnote in because I found this very interesting — that is that The New York Times reported one day last week that the number of reporters outnumbered the delegates 6 to 1. That may well also be evidence of the fact that the American public has sort of tuned out.

In your books, you decry bias of any kind — whether it’s a liberal or a conservative bias.

GOLDBERG: Yes, let me tell you what I said about that. If all of sudden, by some magical alignment of the planets, America’s newsrooms — and not just one newsroom, like let’s say Fox News, but American’s newsrooms — were so blatantly populated overwhelmingly by conservatives, do you think there would be a conservative bias in the news? I do. And my point is if everybody would agree with that, if liberals would be the first to agree with that, then why they don’t see that when newsrooms are overpopulated by liberals you’re going to get a liberal bias. It is as simple as that as far as I am concerned.

GIACHINO: Well, then do you think that Fox News meets its pledge to be "fair and balanced?"

GOLDBERG: I think that Fox News definitely has a conservative attitude. But I think its many critics — and the more popular it gets the more critics it gets — are way off base when they say Fox is like an arm of the Republican Party. There are as many conservative guests on Fox as there are liberal guests. But if they are talking about Fox like Sean Hannity, of course he is conservative. But he is not a journalist, and that is not news. He is a talk show guy, and he has every right to be conservative. But they conveniently forget that sitting right next to him is a liberal, Alan Colmes. They complain about Bill O’Reilly, who I think is an Independent Populist, but they don’t mention at all that at 10:00 at night, or 9:00 central, there is another show hosted by Greta Van Susteren and nobody has ever accused her of being conservative.

You know what it is? Here is what it comes down to. They hate the fact that Fox is there because Fox is popular and it presents both sides in a better way than they do.

GIACHINO: If most media were to separate themselves in liberal and conservative camps, whether they do it consciously or unconsciously, what media outlets would you identify as the most objective, that is being committed to just getting the facts and reporting them without bias?

GOLDBERG: Well, that’s a fair question. I must tell you that I have thought about this for years and I can’t come up with one and say this is the one. Here’s what I do. I think people should watch and read as much news as they have time for. So, in my case, I watch a network newscast at 6:30 p.m. But then at 8:00, I watch Bill O’Reilly on Fox and I am getting a different take on the same story. I wish I could say a certain network will give it to you straight if you go there and that is all that you need to do, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think if you watch the mainstream networks you get a tilt to the left and if you watch Fox — which I think is far fairer than anybody gives it credit for — you are going to get a conservative sensibility. If you read The New York Times you are going to get a left-of-center sensibility, and if you read The Wall Street Journal, at least on the editorial page, you are going to get a right-of-center sensibility.

So I know people have jobs and they don’t have all day to read the paper and watch television, but if you can watch more than one I think that is the best way to go.

GIACHINO: Okay, I think that is fair. Let me now turn to something that I think is a very serious issue for most Americans today and I think you actually wrote quite a bit about it in your books. What’s interesting — I’m not sure whether or not you saw the column which might have run just this week or last by Cal Thomas — but it is a recent column titled "Where was the media before September 11?" I think you devote an entire chapter in Bias to exactly that issue.

GOLDBERG: That’s right.

GIACHINO: The media defends themselves by arguing that leaks in the press actually hurt security measures because it can interfere with intelligence gathering. My question is, do you think that argument is legitimate or is failed reporting more a result of what you describe in the books as lazy journalism?

GOLDBERG: I think that before September 11th — look, September 11th shocked all of us so I don’t want to be too harsh on the media here — but the media never bothered telling us, in any detail anyway, about how much hate was running through the Arab world at the United States. Now, don’t forget, I am talking about before September 11th. They refer to part of the Arab world as "moderate country." Well even in the moderate countries there are rivers of hate flowing through even some of the so-called moderate countries. And the media never told us any of this. We were in the dark. And then September 11th comes and these lunatics strap themselves into the cockpits of airplanes and fly them into buildings and kill all these decent, good American people and we’re all saying "how did this happen?" and "where did these terrorists come from?" — and I don’t mean geographically where did they come from. Well, if they had told us a little about the schools in Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Arab world where they teach kids from kindergarten on to hate us then maybe we would understand where they came from. If they told us that in the so-called moderate Egypt part of the world they run entire series of stories that slander Jewish people, that are so ridiculous that no American anti-Semite would be willing to say, but they run it in Egyptian newspapers and we consider Egypt one of the moderate countries. So, what I am saying is that the media failed miserably at filling us in on the hatred that was aimed at us for years before September 11, 2001. And then when it happened, we all looked up in the sky and said "I don’t know what this is all about." Now we understand what it is all about.

And, by the way, when I wrote that chapter — I finished the book right before September 11th, and then September 11th happened so I wrote about that, and I went online and punched in the words "Koran" and "terrorism" and I couldn’t find anything — the media had done nothing about the Koran and terrorism.

GIACHINO: Yes, you point that out in the book. And when I read Cal Thomas’ article last week my head spun around and I thought "wait, I have heard this before." And then I pulled out the chapter on Bias and there it was.

Mr. Goldberg, if it’s okay, I have a caller on the line with a question.

GOLDBERG: Yes, sure.

CALLER: Thank you. I do believe the term "elite" media because it is owned by such big money interests, but I don’t believe that they are exactly liberal. They have liberal social issues, but I don’t think they have been going hard on President Bush. Like you said, it was Saudi Arabia where the people did not like us, not Iraq. And so I think that whatever helps the big money is what they go with.

GOLDBERG: I mentioned earlier that Bias is mainly not about party politics. It’s not about going easy on Democrats and tough on Republicans. As I said earlier, reporters would go after their liberal grandmothers if they thought it would do them some good or if there was a big enough headline on the other side for doing it. But when it comes to the social issues — affirmative action and race, abortion and feminism, when it comes to gay rights and gay marriage and gay adoption, I have to respectfully disagree — I think the media is overwhelmingly to the left of center.

CALLER: I agree with you on that, it’s just that a lot of Republicans believe — and I don’t believe in either Republican or Democrat, but a lot of Republicans believe that the media is just against Republicans.

GOLDBERG: You’re right. I think some conservatives do think that. And I am not saying that. I do agree with you on that. By the way, when Arrogance first came out I said that I was reaching out to open-minded liberals as well as conservatives. Conservatives, I think, are going to like the book and agree with me and learn things from it, but I said I am reaching out to open-minded liberals also. And it is hard to judge, and I have had some marketing research done and I don’t think that I have had one ounce of success reaching out to open-minded liberals. I hope you will give the book a shot.

CALLER: It does sound interesting since you don’t say that it is party related.

GOLDBERG: Well, let me put it this way, all things being equal, do I think the media elite salivate a little more when they are going after a conservative Republican than a liberal Democrat? Yes, I do.

CALLER: I don’t think they hold the conservative Republicans — they say are pro-life but they don’t do anything about it, and I don’t think the media points that out. I think the media is pro-abortion, but I don’t think they point out that the Republicans have not done much to rid us of abortion. That’s what I am saying. They are really not getting in there. I think the media is just too big. I like the real local media, like the radio stations, where I think you get the real truth.

GOLDBERG: I’ve said this before, "thank God for talk radio" because the kind of conversation that we are having now in Florida I cannot have on ABC News, NBC News or CBS News because they have made a conscious decision that this is not a discussion that they are going to have with me in it. Now, I don’t have any constitutional right, by the way, to be on any TV station or radio station or anything else, but they have lost the right to pretend that they have no biases and no agenda. So I thank God for talk radio and I thank God for cable television because those are about the only two places, along with the Internet, that lets a discussion like this go on.

CALLER: Thank you very much.

GIACHINO: The board is lit up, so I am going to go right to our next caller. Go ahead, it’s your turn.

CALLER 2: You already touched a little bit about what I wanted to talk about. You said that the media had not told us much about terrorism over all these years. I got very heavily involved in listening to talk radio after the Oklahoma City bombing and the message of terrorism and Middle Eastern terrorism, it has all been out there for at least 10 years.

GOLDBERG: Not on network television, it hasn’t.

CALLER 2: Right, that’s what I am saying. It has been on talk radio. So why didn’t the television pick it up?

GOLDBERG: I think part of it is that one of the fundamental things about liberalism is that they root for the underdogs. Now, I see Israel as the underdog in the Middle East, but they, the media and a lot of liberals, see the Arabs as the underdogs in the Middle East. So if they were going to report the kind of stuff we are talking about that might look to them anti-Arab — and they would rather be stoned by an angry mob than be seen anti-Arab, even though it would not be anti-Arab at all — it would just be reporting what is going on. I think this fear of coming off as anti-Arab is one of the reasons that we haven’t heard as much as we should of about the hatred that goes on in that part of the world.

CALLER 2: Okay, one more question and then I’ll let you go. My best friend is in Iraq and has been there well over a year, in fact it is going on two years. We e-mail back and forth and why do we hear over here for the most part is negative, negative, negative. A lot of what I tell him that we hear on the television over here, he doesn’t have any idea of it — he hasn’t seen anything like it as long as he has been over there.

GOLDBERG: In Arrogance, there is a whole chapter on that very point. I think you are 100% right. Reporters don’t report that the First National Bank didn’t get robbed today. They don’t report that a plane landed safely at the Pensacola Airport today. Well, that’s because you’d have to be a moron to think that most banks get robbed — we know that most banks don’t get robbed and we know that most planes do land safely. But how in the world are we going to know what is going on in Iraq unless the media tells us. It’s one thing to know what is going on in downtown wherever you live, it’s another thing to know what is going on in Iraq. Without the media, we don’t have a clue. And they are overwhelmingly negative on that. And by being overwhelmingly negative, we only get a certain picture. I am all for the negative news. I say find all the negative news you can find and give it to us, and then give us the rest of the story. Tell us the good things that are happening, otherwise we cannot understand what is going on in Iraq. As I say, it’s one thing to not have to tell us that the bank did not get robbed — we know that. But if you only give us negative news about Iraq, we have no way of knowing about the good stuff that is going on. And I think they fail miserably in that area. I am totally with you on that.

GIACHINO: Bernie, I’d like to get a little more personal if I can now. I want to know what it is like on an everyday personal level. I mean you gave up a 28 year career at CBS News to write an op-ed piece disclosing the liberal bias that exists in the media. Do you have any regrets about being so candid about many of your previous colleagues?

GOLDBERG: That’s really a very, very insightful question, Renee. Here is how I would answer it. And this has nothing to do with television, and if any kids are listening, I would really aim it at them, but it is aimed at anybody. Every now and then in your life — and when I say every now and then I mean once or twice in your whole life — you need to do something because you know it is right. And there are going to be consequences. And you still need to do it because you know it is right. My life was never the same after I wrote that op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about liberal bias that you read part of in the beginning of the show today. And you know what, I took a lot of hits because of that, and I took a lot of hits at CBS News until I left to write the first book Bias. If you stand up even once in your life and do what you think is right — I had complained about bias in the news privately and quietly to the people I work with and I got absolutely nowhere; that’s why I wrote the op-ed in The Wall Street Journal — if you do it once, if you stand up just once for what is right, you are going to like yourself a lot more. And, if you have to pay a price — I’m not saying people should do this if it means losing their house or their job or whatever — but if you can do it and survive doing it, you’re going to feel very good about yourself.

GIACHINO: Well, I think that some of the reason that you survived it is because you could get up and look yourself in the mirror. That’s what I tell my kids at the end of every day, you have consequences for the things that you have done, but so long as you can look yourself in the mirror the next day and feel good about what you see, I can’t be too critical.

I think there were several people in the media who surprised you because they did side with you — they did speak out on your behalf.

GOLDBERG: Yes, but quietly and privately.

GIACHINO: Were there any who really surprised you?

GOLDBERG: There was only one who publicly, in a big way, said that I was right: Andy Rooney. Andy Rooney went on the Larry King show. And Larry King, who has had about six people on to ask about my book — but he would never have me on to talk about the book, and as I say I have no constitutional right to be on Larry King’s show, but Larry won’t have me on to talk about the book, but he has had a number of people on to ask them what they thought of the book — so he asked Andy Rooney of 60 Minutes what he thought of it. And he said "Bernie Goldberg is right. Bernie Goldberg made some good points." This was a historic statement for someone as big as Andy Rooney to make. And then he said "Dan (referring to Dan Rather) is transparently liberal." I, in my wildest moments, never said that Dan Rather was transparently liberal. But Andy Rooney did. And then Andy Rooney had to just make sure that his bosses knew whose side he was really on, Andy Rooney said, "but Bernie Goldberg is a jerk." Now, I have been called worse, and I hardly thought that was original, so it is not like I was crying over being a "jerk," I have been called a lot worse than that, but it was interesting to me that Andy Rooney knows that I am right and Andy Rooney said it on the Larry King show which is on world wide television. But he just had to make sure that everybody knew that I shouldn’t have said it out loud — that I shouldn’t have written about it. Well why not? If you are in the truth telling business, which I thought Andy Rooney was, then you should say it out loud. And maybe if enough of us say it out loud there could be some change. But Andy had to make sure that — yeah, he’ll say it, but then he had to pull back. At least he said it out loud.

You know, other than Andy Rooney, nobody has come out and said "Bernie is right." You know who is on my side — millions and millions of ordinary, and I use the word "ordinary" in the absolute sense, Americans.

GIACHINO: Well, count me as one of the ordinary. Thank you Mr. Bernard Goldberg, author of Bias and Arrogance. I would read to the listeners the letter that Andy Rooney wrote, because it does conflict with some of what he said on Larry King’s show …

GOLDBERG: Yes, when he found out the letter was in the book he said he wished he had never written it.

GIACHINO: Yes, but I am not going to read it because I think the listeners need to go out and buy your book Bias and your more recent book Arrogance and read about it. Again, thank you writing those books and helping educate us ordinary Americans.

GOLDBERG: Thanks, I hope I made some sense today. I enjoyed the chat. Goodbye Renee.

GIACHINO: Thank you again.