The Goldberg Trepidations

A letter at Romenesko:

From MICHELANGELO SIGNORILE:

Just in case you needed one, here's yet another example of the fallacy of the so-called liberal media -- and a great example, too, of what utter wimps many conservative pundits really are.

Yesterday, a producer at Boston's NPR-affiliate, WBUR, was so eager to get in touch with me that she contacted my editors at both New York Press and Newsday with urgent missives, and also sent me e-mail via my web site. Writing on behalf of the news program The Connection, she wanted me to participate on a show this morning on same-sex marriage. The other guests would be writer E.J. Graff and National Review's Jonah Goldberg. I was on the air myself at the time, doing my own daily three-hour radio program, and didn't get the messages until 4 p.m. I called the relieved producer at that time and told her I could do it. She said she'd have me go to an NPR studio in Manhattan, but also inquired if I could do it from my studio at Sirius Satellite, so definitive was she about having me on.

Then I received a phone call back at 6:30: I was "off the hook" for the show, thank you very much. Turns out conservative pundit Goldberg would not do the show with me. The producer noted that they don't usually let a guest "dictate" who the other guests are, but that it was late and thus hard to find another conservative. That sounded pretty bogus: finding a conservative pundit to do a radio program is about as difficult as finding a drag queen at gay pride.

And what exactly turned fire-breathing, macho Goldberg into a little sissy, running away from a homosexual columnist? The producer said that Goldberg implied to her that we'd had some words, though Goldberg and I have never spoken nor have we ever even exchanged an e-mail. He did "admit," she said, that I am a "powerful" gay columnist (yes, I laughed at that one), but that I'd put out "misinterpretations" of his work. I guess one of those "misinterpretations" was when I criticized him in New York Press after he floated the totally unfounded idea that the Washington, DC sniper suspects were really gay lovers and then gleefully called the capture of the suspects a possible "threefer" (because they were Muslim, African-American and, in the minds of Goldberg and his fellow right-wing smear artists, possibly homosexual).

The other "misinterpretation" might have been when I wrote a column in New York Press exposing one of his editors at the Washington Times, Robert Stacy McCain, as a member of the League of the South, a racist Southern secessionist group. Goldberg had just spent a week piously calling on Trent Lott to step down as Senate Majority leader because of his racially insensitive remarks and now he was exposed as working for an out and out racist himself. (The folks at the American Prospect's blog soon called on Goldberg to follow his own advice to Lott and step down from the Washington Times, but he did not -- nor did he respond at all.)

So, here you have a perfect example of how liberal voices are shut out of the so-called liberal media at the behest of cowardly conservative columnists who spend much of their time railing that the media favor liberals. Even more curious was when the producer of the supposedly liberal NPR affiliate told me that Goldberg said he didn't like my journalism or my "tactics" -- particularly around the issue of "outing" -- and I replied to her how supremely ironic that was given that he is the child of Lucianne Goldberg, the salacious web-maven who helped expose Bill Clinton's sex life and whom Jonah has defended to the hilt. The producer's response: Who is Lucianne Goldberg? Yes, more evidence of that well-informed, agenda-driven liberal media.

Shocking. Especially after Lucianne, Jr. faced off against those hard-hitting journalists at Faux & Fiends.