Bernard Goldberg

Television news reporter and author

WHEN: Wednesday, March 12, 2003

Bernard Goldberg — a television news reporter and author of Bias, a New York Times number one best seller about how the media distorts the news — is widely seen as one of the most original writers and thinkers in broadcast journalism. He has covered stories all over the world for CBS News and has won six Emmy awards for his work as senior correspondent on the CBS News broadcast 48 Hours.

Bernie has reported extensively, both at HBO and at CBS News, on the transformation of American culture. At HBO, in the fall of 2000, he wrote the widely hailed documentary Do You Believe in Miracles, the dramatic story of the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey team and the most famous hockey game ever — the one between the United States and the Soviet Union that revitalized the American spirit and helped bring America out of the malaise it had suffered for much of the 1970s, when gas lines were long, interest rates high, and Iranian radicals held Americans hostage in Teheran.

At CBS, he anchored two prime-time documentaries about how the American landscape was changing. Don't Blame Me showed how the United States was becoming a nation of finger-pointers who more and more were refusing to accept responsibility for their actions. In Your Face America was an hour-long report about the coarsening of America, about how vulgar and uncivil our popular culture was becoming.

Bernie has also written op-ed pieces, which were published in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, about baseball, manners, and journalism. In 1993, the TV Guide picked Goldberg (and nine others including, Morley Safer, Lisa Myers, Bill Cosby and Gary Shandling) as one of the year's most interesting people on television, citing his work "on the drift of American society."