The Rube Goldberg: Bernie Writes a New Book, Makes up New ‘Facts’

And speaking of Rightwing rubes and hacks enjoying big salaries from seemingly-respectable mainstream corporate media outlets, Bernie Goldberg has released his silly new book, A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media, but the well-documented coverage of the book’s arguments, so far, suggests it’s a lollapalooza of inaccuracy, fudged facts, and mangled and out-and-out doctored “evidence”. Color us stunned.

Media Matters has begun to fact-check the book, and has, for example, meticulously examined what Goldberg describes as “snippets” from an interview with NBC’s Tom Brokaw, conducted by PBS’ Charlie Rose, that purportedly reveals how Brokaw, and his Obama-loving big media brethren were in the tank for Obama from the git.

The only trouble? Goldberg has out-and-out doctored the transcript of the actual interview to make his case by completely re-arranging comments (often putting them entirely out of order), changing actual words to give them entirely different meanings than obviously intended when viewing the actual transcript, and leaving out huge chunks of the discussion which completely counter the argument being made by Goldberg — who laughably considers himself both a journalist and a media crictic — to try to sandbag the targets of his hit piece.

For example, at the end of one of the books many snarky grafs in which Goldberg argues that Brokaw waited until “just before Election Day to decide that he had no idea who Obama was,” Goldberg sniffs “Ain’t journalism wonderful?”

He then offers some of the “snippets” from that interview to help make his case, like this one:

Brokaw’s busted, right?! Not so fast. Because now it gets high-larious. Or, at least it would be high-larious, were it not for the seemingly endless wingnut welfare available to the rube Goldberg and his ilk, from multi-million dollar propaganda houses like the rightwing whacko Regnery Publishing, who describe themselves, accidentally(?) ironically, as “a hit machine”.

So, here’s how MM dissects what was actually said, as documented by the actual, unedited transcript of the Brokaw/Rose interview, as compared to Goldberg’s wholly mangled, out-of-context, out-of-order, “quoted” snippet above…

As you can see, Goldberg’s “snippet” was not even close to what was actually said in the interview.

Ain’t journalism wonderful?

For the full extent of Goldberg’s astounding hackery — and often, even more grotesque reporting hatchet job on the Brokaw/Rose interview — see MM’s full article. For shorter, but no less embarrassing, coverage of other points in the book which collapse immediately upon inspection, see here and here.

To see and hear Goldberg for yourself, tune into the O’Reilly Factor on Fox “News” almost any night of the week, or Sean Hannity on ABC Radio (where both of the government welfare queens, Goldberg and Hannity, enjoy the government largess of our public airwaves on a daily basis to promote their phony horseshit to you and millions of others). Remember: Liars and clowns like O’Reilly, Hannity, Goldberg et al come into your cars and homes nearly every day thanks to your public tax dollars. Enjoy! Or fix the problem.