I think you're stretching a bit in transferring the experience at a single cable-access channel into "left wing bias" in the entire media. And I hardly think that "They didn't say what I wanted them to say" has anything to do with political slant, that's more about the manufactured evening news, and probably happens on every single story regardless of topic or angle. If you think the entire media has a liberal bias today, you haven't been paying attention.

I sympathize, but last I checked the First Amendment didn't require tv call-in shows to leave abusive (or any) callers on the air.

Goldberg's book was shown by Bob Somerby to be a lazy stew of bad research and a lot of personal resentment against Dan Rather, etc.

I suggest you look up Bernard Goldberg at http://www.dailyhowler.com -- Somerby shows how Goldberg deliberately miscontrued very elementary chnks of reserach like using Google and Nexus to get at things like how often a politician is described by narrators as "right wing" and "left wing."

It's an incredibly slender reed to lean a major thesis on, and it is so incompetent (lazy is probably a better word, an indifference to process) one wonders if Goldberg's best days weren't behind him anyway.

The Nexus search showed the opposite of what Goldberg claimed. News reports showed no predilection for identifying "right-wingers" as such, while palming off "left-wingers" like Ted Kennedy as mainstream. It was a fabrication on Golberg's part from beginning to end, because he knew he would sell books with an outrageous rightwing thesis. It's made him a rich man.

As for your experiences with Reagan's shooting, they are anecdotal, and I don't buy them. I am what you would call a lefist -- voted for McGovern, etc. And I watched the reports with a bunch of reporters from a very progressive New Haven alternative newspaper called The Advocate. We were all sickened; it reminded us of the horrible experiences when our heroes -- JFK, RFK, MLK, Jr. -- were gunned down. Believe me, those were times for tears and despair, not flippancy.

Of course, when it turned out that Reagan was shot by a nonpolitical lunatic John Hinckley, who was in love with a Yale local lesbian and performed the deed to impress her, we breathed a sigh of relief. They couln't hang this one on us. Although that is what Sipos is now doing, 20 years after the fact, with an anecdote no one can prove or disprove.

Sorry, Tom, your story doesn't pass the smell test. Do you have any corroboration from anyone else in the room who was horrified at the callopus behavior? Surely you were not the only decent person on hand, decent enough not to applaud an assassination attempt?

We live in a world of so many shameless lies, like Goldberg's and Coulter's, that it is hard to give credence to an ancient unverifiable story that makes no pyschological sense.

One episode that day did make me laugh: Al Haig's naked attempt to grab the reins of the executive branch, presidential succession rules to the contrary notwithstanding. But it was a rueful laugh, let me tell you.

I will say this, that the big media were more liberal in 1981. But that's all reversed today, of course, with eight large conservative corporations and major GOP contributors dominating the media landscape -- AOL Time Warner, Disney, Westinghouse, GE, Newscorp, Washington Post, Newhouse and Gannett.

Even if you could show that the media of 1981 were liberal to an evil degree, as you are are attempting here, how would that alter today's reality?