Media Matters has launched an offensive against Bernard Goldberg’s new book, A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media.
The organization, self-described as a “progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media,” currently features on its website four anti-Slobbering missives.
Among the bones of contention:
> That the book “offers an example of the media’s purported ‘pro-Obama bias’ that collapses on minimal review. In Chapter One, Goldberg cites as evidence the fact that The Early Show ran a segment called ‘Five Things You Should Know About Barack Obama’ that featured trivia about Obama. But five days later, the show ran a segment called ‘Five Things You Should Know’ about Sen. John McCain.”
Goldberg tells TVNewser in response: “The five things we didn’t know about Barack Obama on [The Early Show] included things like he didn’t like ice cream and he was competitive when he played board games.
“Now, what were some of the five things we didn’t know about John McCain on [The Early Show]? That he finished fifth from the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy, that he crashed his plane not once, not twice, but three times, that his high school nickname was ‘the punk,’ and that he was called a carpetbagger when he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives from Arizona.
“And Media Matters — the left wing group funded by George Soros — thinks this makes their case? No, this makes my case of how the media treated Obama and McCain very, very differently. Frankly, Media Matters should stick to slandering people and stop being so picky.”
> That the book offers an edited transcript of a Charlie Rose interview of Tom Brokaw that “falsely suggests…that Brokaw expressed the view that ‘there’s a lot about [Obama] we don’t know,’ when, in fact, Brokaw attributed that assertion to ‘conservative commentators’…”
Goldberg’s response: “The overall point Tom Brokaw is making is that neither he nor others in the media knew as much about Barack Obama as they wanted to know. This is an impression that left not only me but apparently Tom Brokaw feeling uneasy.”
> Media Matters also takes a shot at Fox News Channel, which is criticized for a “Right-Wing Author Stimulus Plan.” Media Matters cites the recent appearances of Goldberg and Ann Coulter on the network to promote their books.
It should be noted that Coulter has been interviewed on other networks, including CBS and NBC. Goldberg’s publicist tells TVNewser that Goldberg will be interviewed tonight by CNN’s Lou Dobbs.
• Earlier: TVNewser’s interview with Bernard Goldberg