Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News

Publisher's Description:
In his nearly thirty years at CBS News, Emmy Award-winner Bernard Goldberg earned a reputation as one of the preeminent reporters in the television news business. When he looked at his own industry, however, he saw that the media far too often ignored their primary mission: objective, disinterested reporting. Again and again he saw that they slanted the news to the left. For years Goldberg appealed to reporters, producers, and network executives for more balanced reporting, but no one listened. The liberal bias continued. In Bias, he blows the whistle on the news business, showing exactly how the media slant their coverage while insisting that they're just reporting the facts.

Crazy Like A Fox: The Inside Story of How Fox News Beat CNN

How brutal is the cable news business? When Fox News CEO Roger Ailes learned that Paula Zahn was negotiating with archrival CNN, Ailes fired Zahn immediately. When a reporter pointed out that Zahn had boosted ratings for Fox, Ailes replied, "I could have put a dead raccoon on the air this year and gotten a better rating than last year."

Crazy Like A Fox tells one of the most dramatic business stories of the past decade—the war over cable news. In 1991, with its coverage of the first Gulf War, Ted Turner’s CNN reinvented the television news business and became a global brand name. In 1995, NBC and Microsoft pooled their enormous resources to create MSNBC. But by 2003, both had been dwarfed in the ratings by Rupert Murdoch’s seven-year-old Fox News Channel. How did Fox News pull off this amazing victory and how is its success— and its alleged right-wing slant—changing the entire media world?

Scott Collins provides a shocking account of corporate arrogance and intrigue, with all the brash personalities and back-room dealings involved in the war for ratings. He offers inside tales about a virtual Who’s Who of American television: not just corporate players like Turner, Murdoch, Ailes, Walter Isaacson, and Bob Wright, but also on-air talent like Paula Zahn, Bill O’Reilly, Connie Chung, Phil Donahue, Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren, and Larry King. Collins also shows what happened behind the camera during the biggest news stories of our time, including the 2000 election, September 11, and Gulf War II.

Tick... Tick... Tick...: The Long Life & Turbulent Times of 60 Minutes by David Blum

Book Description:
The story of how CBS's 60 Minutes grew from a little network experiment into a Sunday-night-at-seven addiction for most of the country would itself make a raucous and typically compelling 60 Minutes episode. Or, maybe, an opera, complete with rival tenors, backstage intrigues, imperious divas, vulnerable ingenues, tragic deaths, a handful of big and small wars, and a brilliant if maniacal maestro running the whole production. For two years, author David Blum talked to everybody connected to 60 Minutes, and, incredibly, everybody talked to him -- about themselves, about the show, about one another. Blum's unprecedented inside access takes us into story meetings, blood-on-the-wall editing sessions, turf wars, and to the heart of the rivalries and the myths -- who got hired, who got fired, who got screwed -- going as far back as theearliest black-and-white days.

In a history that spans four decades, 60 Minutes has piled up an encyclopedic list of first-and-onlys: it has aired fourteen-hundred-plus times, hauled in a profit of two billion dollars for CBS, finished in TV's top ten for twenty-two consecutive seasons, and garnered sixty-eight Emmy Awards. In the process, producer-guru Don Hewitt's beloved "tigers" -- correspondents Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Ed Bradley, Lesley Stahl, Steve Kroft, Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer, Meredith Vieira, the late Harry Reasoner, and cranky essayist Andy Rooney -- have become brand names and media demigods. Hidden cameras, "gotcha" interviews, in-your-face confrontational journalism -- this is where it all began.

And thirty-six years later, Hewitt's still there, pounding his desk, swearing at his tigers (most of whom are also still there), and holding in his tightly clenched fist the patent on the mother of all magazine shows.

Or, rather, he was, until just recently, when a bunch of younger guys in suits decided it was time to take 60 Minutes away from its eighty-one-year-old boss. The changes, the innovations, the stop-the-presses big stories -- for Hewitt, and maybe a couple of the others -- are, at last, winding down. But the story of the most successful and contentious program in TV history is not over yet: the new guys are settling in and the future is up for grabs.

The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt

The author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil returns after more than a decade to give us an intimate look at the "magic, mystery, and decadence" of the city of Venice and its inhabitants

It was seven years ago that Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil achieved a record-breaking four-year run on The New York Times bestseller list. John Berendt's inimitable brand of nonfiction brought the dark mystique of Savannah so startlingly to life for millions of people that tourism to Savannah increased by 46 percent. It is Berendt and only Berendt who can capture Venice-a city of masks, a city of riddles, where the narrow, meandering passageways form a giant maze, confounding all who have not grown up wandering into its depths. Venice, a city steeped in a thousand years of history, art and architecture, teeters in precarious balance between endurance and decay. Its architectural treasures crumble--foundations shift, marble ornaments fall--even as efforts to preserve them are underway. The City of Falling Angels opens on the evening of January 29, 1996, when a dramatic fire destroys the historic Venice opera house. The loss of the Fenice, where five of Verdi's operas premiered, is a catastrophe for Venetians. Arriving in Venice three days after the fire, Berendt becomes a kind of detective-inquiring into the nature of life in this remarkable museum-city-while gradually revealing the truth about the fire. In the course of his investigations, Berendt introduces us to a rich cast of characters: a prominent Venetian poet whose shocking "suicide" prompts his skeptical friends to pursue a murder suspect on their own; the first family of American expatriates that loses possession of the family palace after four generations of ownership; an organization of high-society, partygoing Americans who raise money to preserve the art and architecture of Venice, while quarreling in public among themselves, questioning one another's motives and drawing startled Venetians into the fray; a contemporary Venetian surrealist painter and outrageous provocateur; the master glassblower of Venice; and numerous others-stool pigeons, scapegoats, hustlers, sleepwalkers, believers in Martians, the Plant Man, the Rat Man, and Henry James.

Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday by Robin Hemley

In 1971, a tiny band of appealingly primitive people was discovered in the Philippines. Profiled on the NBC Evening News, the Tasaday, as they were called, were soon touted as the most significant anthropological discovery of the century, appealing to Westerners curious about the ancient past, and who also fretted about the impact modernity might have on such long-isolated peoples. But in the mid-1980s, Swiss reporter Oswald Iten revealed the group as a hoax. Fascinated by the controversy, Hemley (The Last Studebaker) looks to rescue the Tasaday from the verdicts of what he views as a hyperbolic Western media. From the outset, the Tasaday were tainted by their association with their megalomaniacal protector, Manuel Manda Elizalde, who combined genuine concern for the group with a naked desire to profit through them. Unsurprisingly, the band's reception was inextricably linked with the fortunes of the Marcos and Aquino regimes, and revolutionary guerrilla movements in the region made contact with the Tasaday dangerous. What's clear is that the Tasaday were exploited by enthusiasts and skeptics alike fodder for romantic noble savage ideals as well as for cynicism. Arguments surrounding the Tasaday hinge on questions of language, location and genealogy, and Hemley's noncommittal approach essentially that the Tasaday fell somewhere between genuine article and hoax isn't the best conduit for clarity. What remains clear is that isolation of this sort is a construct; as Henley writes, to our great dismay, no one is as isolated as we once thought. Indeed, stripped of Western rhetoric, the Tasadays' real identity proves elusive. To his credit, Hemley is the rare Westerner who leaves the Tasaday with their enigma and dignity intact.

Writing Broadcast News -- Shorter, Sharper, Stronger by Mervin Block

Thoroughly revised and greatly expanded, this new edition is even more helpful than the classic first edition. The 1997 revision of Writing Broadcast News - Shorter, Sharper, Stronger is 40 percent longer. And it's even richer and smoother...

The author, Mervin Block, is a pro. He has been a staff write for the "CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite" and the "ABC Evening News with Frank Reynolds", and he has also written for NBC's "Today." He has tough broadcast newswriting at Columbia's University's Graduate School of Journalism, and he has been teaching workshops in radio and television newsrooms around the country.

Block knows what he is talking about. And writing about. He writes the way he talks, and he talks the way he writes. Best of all, his book is readable -- and enjoyable. And, for writers who apply its expert tips, profitable.

Writing Broadcast News (1987) was written for working newspeople, and it has been widely accepted in the broadcasting industry as a professional handbook. Many college teachers have adopted it as a textbook. No matter how you classify it, Block's book belongs on every broadcast writer's shelf. But writers don't want on their shelf. They want it at their elbow. Or in their hands.
This newly revised edition provides:

• Ways to deal with common problems and common questions writer face.

• Hundreds of example from local and network scripts, radio and TV, with rewrites and commentary.

• Countless asides and little lessons in language.

• Block's Top Tips of the Trade, his Dozen deadly Don't and a raft of Venial Sins. All are designed to make writers more adept in writing for the ear.

• A selection of his "WordWaching" columns from Communicator, the magazine of the Radio-Television News Directors Association.

• A comprehensive index.

News Flash: Journalism, Infotainment and the Bottom-Line Business of Broadcast News by Bonnie Anderson

While talking heads debate the media’s alleged conservative or liberal bias, award-winning journalist Bonnie Anderson knows that the problem with television news isn’t about the Left versus the Right-- it’s all about the money. From illegal hiring practices to ethnocentric coverage to political cheerleading, News Flash exposes how American broadcast conglomerates’ pursuit of the almighty dollar consistently trumps the need for fair and objective reporting. Along the way to the bottomline, the proud tradition of American television journalism has given way to an entertainment-driven industry that’s losing credibility and viewers by the day.

As someone who has worked as both a broadcast reporter and a network executive, Anderson details how the networks have been co-opted by bottom-line thinking that places more value on a telegenic face than on substantive reporting. Network executives—the real power in broadcast journalism—are increasingly employing tactics and strategies from the entertainment industry. They "cast" reporters based on their ability to "project credibility," value youth over training and experience, and often greenlight coverage only if they can be assured that it will appeal to advertiser-friendly demographics.

Associated Press Broadcast News Handbook

Originally available only to Associated Press members, this is the definitive guide to writing and delivering the news on radio, television, and other broadcast media. While the focus throughout is on the art of finding, researching, writing, editing, producing, and delivering authoritative, accurate, and exciting news stories, it also provides a wealth of information on key technical aspects involved, such as how to handle a microphone and how many tape recorders to carry in the field. An indispensable resource for students and experienced broadcast journalists alike, this Handbook also includes a comprehensive, quick-reference style guide covering the established norms and practices in punctuation, tone, diction, use of foreign terms, references, and much more.

The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage

For anyone who writes -- a short story or a business plan, a book report or a news report -- knotty choices of spelling, grammar, punctuation and word meaning lurk in every line: Lay or lie? Who or whom? None is or none are? Is touch-tone a trademark? Is Day-Glo? It's enough to send you for a Martini. (Or is that a martini?)

Now everyone can find answers in the handy alphabetical guide used by the thousand journalists of the world's most authoritative newspaper. The guidelines to correct hyphenation, punctuation, capitalization and foreign and English spelling are crisp and compact, created for instant reference in the rush of deadlines. Rewritten for the first time in twenty-three years and greatly expanded since the last edition, the manual tackles issues that will follow writers into the new century:

• How to respect the equality of the sexes without self-conscious devices such as "he or she"
• How to choose thoughtfully between terms like African-American and black; Hispanic and Latino; American Indian and Native American
• How to translate the vocabulary of e-mail and cyberspace for everyday readers, and how to cope with the eccentric capitalization and punctuation of Internet company names and Web site addresses

The authors have more than seventy years of combined newsroom experience, most of it at The Times. They recognize that our language is changing, but they tailor their responses to the paper's impression of its readership: "educated and sophisticated... traditional but not tradition-bound."

They counsel a fluid style, easygoing but not slangy, the unpretentious language of a letter to a literate friend. They invite readers of the manual to be precise while casting off the stodgy (among dozens of examples, writing before instead of the pompous prior to, and carry out instead of implement).

The authors also offer a thumbnail guide to newsroom ethics and standards in their entries on anonymous sources, attribution, fairness and obscenity. And they seed the rules with wry humor. (On vogue words: "Wannabe is the faddish slang of adults who, well, want to be teenagers." And about the late: "Do not fall into this error: Only the late Senator Miel opposed the bill. He was almost certainly alive at the time.")

For writers, editors, students, researchers and all who love language, The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage is an entertaining tool as well as an essential reference.