Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Jan. 1, 2002

Within hours the wrath of the liberal media came down on him for daring to expose their dirty little secret. His boss Andrew Heyward shouted at him that writing that critique of an outrageously biased Eric Engberg "Reality Check" segment on the "CBS Evening News" was "like raping my wife and kidnapping my kids."

Dan Rather, a longtime friend and associate, simply stopped talking to him - for good. Engberg told him he was "full of s--t."

The reaction in the media was so violent a friend told him, "I would suggest you call the FBI and see if they'll put you in the witness protection program."

Writes Goldberg: "Many of my colleagues, the news liberals who had always preached openness and tolerance, stopped talking to me, fearing my radioactivity would rub off on them. But then, in the elegant phrase of the journalist Brian Brown, liberals these days have forgotten how to be liberal.

"After a quarter of a century at CBS News - half my entire life - I had become a non person."

Now the courageous newscaster has gone all the way, writing "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News," a blockbuster expose of the shocking liberal bias that has turned much of America's media elite into propaganda tools for their leftist views.

Goldberg's scathing report on his former colleagues in the media is a must read for all Americans who want their news straight and unbiased. Reading it amounts to an act of patriotism.

In this first of a three-part series, Goldberg tells us how the media created homelessness as an issue to bash Republicans but forgot about it when Bill Clinton came to office.

Part One:
How Bill Clinton Cured Homelessness

"In the 1980s, I started noticing that the homeless people we showed on the news didn't look very much like the homeless people I was tripping over on the sidewalk," Goldberg recalled.

Instead, those homeless people he was tripping over were mostly winos or drug addicts or schizophrenics. "They mumbled crazy things or gave you an evil eye when they put paper coffee cups in your face and 'asked' for money," he wrote. "Or they had drool coming down the side of their mouths and lived in cardboard boxes ... but only until the spaceship came back to take them home to the Planet Neutron."

But these weren't the homeless people the media chose to portray - the ones seen on television were very different. Goldberg describes them as looking as if they came "from your neighborhood and mine - they looked like us."

The message those shots of the elegant homeless they showed us was simply that "they were like us."

The problem with this was that such people represented only a tiny fraction of the homeless. "In a word, we put them on TV for the reason that television people do almost everything - ratings," he explained.

Noting that TV people know who their viewers are and what they look like, Goldberg wrote that they knew that viewers would be drawn more to stories about homeless people who looked just like their own parents, sons and daughters than the "homeless people who looked like - well - homeless people."

But that wasn't the only reason, he adds. Winning sympathy for the tiny fraction of attractive homeless folks also won sympathy for the unseen and very unattractive homeless people - and that created pressure for new social programs such as new homeless shelters - preferably located in someone else's neighborhood.

Winning such sympathy required the media to exaggerate the numbers of the homeless present in the 1980s and early '90s, a figure no one knew for certain. The best estimates were between the Census Bureau's 230,000 and Urban Institute's 355,000 to 462,000.

These numbers were no secret to journalists, but, Goldberg wrote, "They just didn't care."

Those figures were simply far too low to justify the full-court press the liberals in the media wanted to launch. And so they came up with their own figures, most of them "sucked from their thumbs" as reporters describe picking "facts" out of midair.

Then there was the homeless lobby, which hiked the figure up into the millions.

Isn't There Room at Candy's House?

CNN's Candy Crowley reported that "winter is on the way and three million Americans have no place to call home."

Then NBC's Jackie Nespral upped the ante by reporting "nationally right now, five million people are believed to be homeless ... and the numbers are increasing."

But Nespral was a mere piker at the media's number inflation game.

CBS's Charles Osgood sent the figure skyward, warning, "It is estimated that by the year 2000, nineteen million Americans will be homeless unless something is done, and done now."

Get out Your Handkerchiefs

Ray Brady, another CBS star, went everybody one better - he discovered homeless people who actually lived in homes - he called them the "hidden homeless." These, he explained, were kids living with their parents because they couldn't afford to have their own places. Many such "hidden homeless" were, as Goldberg writes, forced to live "in cushy houses in the suburbs with big-screen TVs and three squares a day."

The media's frenzy over the homeless had a serious political edge to it - promoting the homeless myth enabled the media to blame it on Ronald Reagan.

Reporting on an October 1989 rally in Washington on behalf of vagrants, ABC's John Martin said: "They came here to Washington from all over the country - the rich, the famous, the ordinary down-and-out. They staged the biggest rally in behalf of the homeless since the Reagan Revolution forced severe cutbacks in government housing programs."

Tom Brokaw went him one better. In 1989 he proclaimed: "Reagan as commander-in-chief was the military's best friend. He gave the Pentagon almost everything it wanted." Then, as Goldberg reports, "With pictures of the homeless on the TV screen, Brokaw said 'Social programs? They suffered under Reagan but he refused to see the cause and effect.'"

To NBC's Garrick Utley, Reagan all but created derelicts. In 1990 he reported: "In the 1980s, the Reagan years, the amount of government money spent to build low-cost housing was cut drastically. Then homelessness began to appear on streets and in doorsteps."

Then, miraculously, homelessness vanished. Goldberg reports that in the early 1990s, "A miracle descended upon the land. Homelessness disappeared. It no longer existed in the entire United States of America.

"I know that homelessness ceased to exist because I watch television news. If homeless people still existed, Dan and Tom and Peter would have them all over the news."

Goldberg thinks he knows how vagrancy was abolished.

"I could be wrong, but I think homelessness ended the day Bill Clinton was sworn in as president. Which is one of those incredible coincidences, since it pretty much began the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president."

Next: Goldberg experiences intolerance and hatred from his fellow "liberals."

Get "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News" at a discount from NewsMax.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Dan Rather/CBS

Media Bias

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