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Anyone reading Bernard Goldberg's best selling book, Bias, may say: "Aha, just what I thought. The news media has a liberal bias." It's not a new charge. What makes Goldberg's book unique is that he is the first network television insider to write about it. He did so only after the network ignored his pleas for balance.

Goldberg was an esteemed news producer at CBS and worked closely with Dan Rather and top network brass. He first shared his ideas publicly in an op-ed piece published by The Wall Street Journal. After that, Andy Rooney was about the only one at CBS who would talk to him. Dan Rather felt betrayed.

The ironic thing is that CBS and its "60 Minutes" crew polished the art of putting corporate whistle-blowers on the air. That was fine, as long as it was a tobacco company or meat packer or giant utility that was being skewered. "If I had worked at Firestone and blown the whistle on defective tires, CBS would have immortalized me," Goldberg said. "Unfortunately, the defective product I was making noise about wasn't tires; it was network news." This respected newsman was asked for an apology, kept off the air and labeled a political activist with wacky ideas. His career was virtually over.

Among Goldberg's criticisms is that the news media make liberal views appear to be in the mainstream while conservative choices are portrayed as being far out. "Why is it that the word 'left-wing' has virtually vanished from the media's vocabulary? 'Right-wing' is doing quite well, thank you," he said.

One specific example is a 1996 CBS news report about presidential candidate Steve Forbes' plan for a flat-tax. The reporter flattened the flat tax and made Forbes out to be some kind of nut for proposing it. Goldberg makes it clear that this is not some news media conspiracy. It's not a bunch of news chiefs sitting around deciding how to slant the news. No, worse yet, it just comes naturally.

Another example is the coverage given to the plight of the homeless. Goldberg says the media make it seem that Republican spending policies are a leading cause of people being homeless and not alcohol and drug abuse and the closing down of state mental hospitals.

He says daycare is an issue manipulated by a liberal media so feminist groups won't be offended. "The problem is that they don't let the other voices on. The ones who say that most toddlers are better off with their own mothers than with day-care workers and that most adolescent kids would do better if a parent were home after school instead of being alone and 'fending for themselves,'" Goldberg said.

The liberal bias in the news media comes down to this, in Goldberg's opinion: "It's about how they frame the big issues of the day."

Farmers know what he is talking about. They've seen issues like private property rights, tax relief, energy development and environmental regulations get reported more often from a liberal perspective.