Reader John Lee has Google Smarts. In answer to our query the other day re when -- if ever -- Pauline Kael made that oft-quoted remark about her shock at Nixon's (or was it Reagan's?) landslide since no one she knew had voted Republican, Lee made the same Google search we had, with the same mixed results. But then he took the next step, noticing that the Kael quotation had started appearing in 1972, which strongly suggests that -- as the campaign slogan used to say -- Nixon's the one!
For fun, we typed in a Google search for "pauline kael 1972 'no one I know voted for Nixon,'" and among the results was this Bernard Goldberg Opinion Journal op ed from May of 2001, presciently headlined "Rather Clueless: Dan can't help it. He doesn't know he's biased":
In 1996 after I wrote about liberal bias on this very page, Dan was furious and during a phone conversation he indicated that picking The Wall Street Journal to air my views was especially appalling given the conservative views of the paper's editorial page. "What do you consider the New York Times?" I asked him, since he had written op-eds for that paper. "Middle of the road," he said.
I couldn't believe he was serious. The Times is a newspaper that has taken the liberal side of every important social issue of our time, which is fine with me. But if you see the New York Times editorial page as middle of the road, one thing is clear: You don't have a clue.
And it is this inability to see liberal views as liberal that is at the heart of the entire problem . . . The media elites can float through their personal lives and rarely run into someone with an opposing view. This is very unhealthy and sometimes downright ridiculous, as when Pauline Kael, for years the brilliant film critic at The New Yorker, was completely baffled about how Richard Nixon could have beaten George McGovern in 1972: "Nobody I know voted for Nixon." Never mind that Nixon carried 49 states. She wasn't kidding.
That was tasty and whetted our appetite. We typed in another Google search for "bernard goldberg pauline kael" and came up with more delicious food for thought from April of 2003:
Veteran CBS correspondent and best-selling author Bernard Goldberg predicts that the liberal media establishment will collapse much like the Berlin Wall.
Goldberg said that millions of Americans are voting with their feet and getting their news from alternative media including Fox News Channel, talk radio and Web sites such as NewsMax.com.
Goldberg explained that liberal media bias, despite an almost total blackout in Big Media about his book “Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News,” had created a tremendous market for it and helped make it a No. 1 New York Times best seller.
That collapsing Berlin Wall simile is good. The MSM's shameless/shameful, unashamedly biased performance during Election 2004 can only hasten the fall.
Only loss of advertising revenue will defeat liberal media bias. Do the managers who buy advertising know that they are losing readership and listeners?
Posted by: acjgoomp | November 21, 2004 at 12:35 PM