Bio
Bernard Goldberg, the television news reporter and author of Bias, a New York Times number one bestseller about how the media distort 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 14 Emmy awards for excellence in journalism. He won six Emmys at CBS, and eight more at HBO, where he reported for the widely acclaimed broadcast Real Sports.
In addition to his ground-breaking book Bias, Goldberg has written four other books on the media and American culture — Arrogance, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America: (And Al Franken is #37), Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right, and A Slobbering Love Affair, about the news media’s romance with Barack Obama. All have all been New York Times bestsellers.
In 2006 Bernie won the most prestigious of all broadcast journalism awards, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award (considered the broadcast equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize), for an HBO story about young, poor boys who were sold or kidnapped into slavery and were forced to risk their lives as camel jockeys in the United Arab Emirates, one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
In 2012, Bernie was honored again with another duPont, this time for a groundbreaking body of work on the effects of head trauma on athletes.
And then again, in 2018, Bernie and a team of Real Sports journalists won still another duPont-Columbia Award for a story about the Olympics entitled “Lord of the Rings.” As the duPont committee described it: “This ambitions investigative report — filmed in nine countries — exposed graft and corruption in the IOC and detailed how its members pursue wealth, privilege, and self-glory at the expense of the Games.
Bernie has reported extensively, both at HBO and at CBS News, on the transformation of the American culture. At HBO, in the fall of 2000, he wrote the Emmy award winning 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 game between the United States and the Soviet Union that revitalized the American spirit and helped bring America out of the malaise it had suffered though much of the 1970s.
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 whose citizens 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 written op-ed pieces that appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, about a wide range of subjects, including baseball, manners, and journalism.
He also worked as an analyst for Fox News, commenting on the big news events of the day as well as cultural and media issues.
He is a graduate of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey and a member of the school’s Hall of Distinguished Alumni.
Political Views
Though Bernie has long been described as a conservative, he previously rejected the label, describing himself as a life-long liberal modeled after the 1960s ideals of the Democratic Party. In a February 22, 2012 interview, Goldberg said:
“I consider myself to be an old-fashioned liberal. I’m a liberal the way liberals used to be when they were like John F. Kennedy and when they were like Hubert Humphrey, when they were upbeat and enthusiastic and mainstream. I am not a liberal the way liberals are today, at least as exemplified by Al Franken and Michael Moore, where they’re angry, nasty, closed minded, and not mainstream, but fringe.”
He has since accepted the categorization, saying in 2020, “I see myself as a conservative with live and let live principles… a conservative libertarian I guess. Now, even when I agree with liberals on this issue or that, I no longer want to be on their team. I not only don’t accept their new left wing politics, it’s also their holier than thou elitism that annoys me. I no longer see myself as a liberal. They left me, not the other way around. Now, I’m a conservative. Not a right-wing nut, just a conservative with libertarian tendencies.”
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