The truth and facts = "Liberal Bias"

Bill Moyers was interviewed by Broadcasting & Cable and was asked the following question: You are the exemplar of liberal PBS bias, according to Ken Tomlinson. Was your show liberally biased? And Moyers answer:

Right-wing partisans like Tomlinson have always attacked aggressive reporting as liberal.

We were biased, all right—in favor of uncovering the news that powerful people wanted to keep hidden: conflicts of interest at the Department of Interior, secret meetings between Vice President Cheney and the oil industry, backdoor shenanigans by lobbyists at the FCC, corruption in Congress, neglect of wounded veterans returning from Iraq, Pentagon cost overruns, the manipulation of intelligence leading to the invasion of Iraq.

We were way ahead of the news curve on these stories, and the administration turned its hit men loose on us.

Tomlinson actually told The Washington Post that he was irate over one of our documentary reports from a small town in Pennsylvania hard-hit by outsourcing.

If reporting on what's happening to ordinary people thrown overboard by circumstances beyond their control and betrayed by Washington officials is liberalism, I stand convicted.

It is an old canard of right-wing ideologues like Tomlinson to equate tough journalism with liberalism. They hope to distract people from the message by trying to discredit the messenger.

Now threw the fear of God into Tomlinson's crowd because they couldn't dispute the accuracy of our reporting.

And when we weren't reporting the truth behind the news, we were interviewing a wide variety of people: Ralph Reed and Ralph Nader; Cal Thomas and Molly Ivins; Robert Bartley, editor of the Wall Street Journal; Katrina Vandenheuval, editor of The Nation; The Conservative Union's David Keene; Dorothy Rabinowitz (also of the Wall Street Journal); Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity; the Club for Growth's Stephen Moore; historian Howard Zinn; and Indian activist Arundhati Roy. And on and on.

That pretty well sums it up. It's "liberal" journalism when they uncover the facts and report them. We are in the mess we are in today because there were too few journalists and news organizations that were willing to uncover or report the facts. The media was full of ideologues like Judith Miller and Andrea Mithchell. The media was full of "journalists" who were more concerned with their celebrity status and careers that with the truth like Bob Woodward and Norah O'Donnell. The major news organizations were intimidated by the conservative spinners and terrified at the the label "liberal journalism". The press that was all over Bill Clinton for lying about sex refused to report that the Bush administration was lying about Iraq. Yes "liberal bias" equals the truth and when the truth becomes a casualty Democracy is not far behind.