Media again become easy critical targets. (Commentary).

WE all face the problem sooner or later. You've got a brother-in-law who makes choking noises when Tom Brokaw reads the news; your sister turns blue listening to Daniel Schorr on NPR; your aging Pop sets fire to The New York Times op-ed page whenever Paul Krugman writes a column.

What do you give a loved one who loves to loathe the press?

The last month has seen the publication of three books that will lift the spirit of the most ardent media-basher. Two of these have slipped quietly onto bookstore shelves, but a third - Bernard Goldberg's "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News" (Regnery) - has managed to kick up a fuss.

And no wonder. Now a sports reporter at HBO, Goldberg was for more than 20 years a reporter in good standing with CBS News. Then one day in early 1996, he watched an evening news segment in which his colleague Eric Engberg ridiculed Steve Forbes's proposed flat tax, and something snapped.

Going public

"This was junk journalism," Goldberg writes. For years. he claims, CBS management had shrugged off his protests about the news division's liberal tilt. So he decided to go public, writing an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal attacking Engberg's report in particular and the leftward bias of big-time journalism in general.

In a miracle of verbal inflation, Goldberg has tugged and teased his original thousand-word op-ed into a book of more than 200 pages. He's the sort of writer who likes to restate his redundancies again before he repeats them. Still, he includes enough juicy bits - his portrait of Rather is scathing - to delight any media-basher, and also to infuriate his own ex-colleagues.

Goldberg's book offers arguments that will be persuasive to his fellow conservatives, less so to others. It is a sermon aimed squarely at the choir. Our other two selections, however, reach for a more sophisticated assessment of the news business and largely succeed.

In "Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism" (Encounter), former Newsweek reporter William McGowan limits his critique to American journalism's preoccupation with "diversity; which in many newsrooms has transformed a well-meaning sensitivity to racial matters into a justification for spinning the news, verging sometimes on fabrication.

Among multiple instances, McGowan dwells on the 1996 "epidemic of church burnings" that allegedly swept through black communities in the South; the phrase comes from USA Today, which broke the story as an example of the country's lingering legacy of racism.

But there was no such epidemic, as more skeptical reporters discovered on closer examination. There had been no upsurge in arson against black churches in the South, and in fact the number of church fires in black and white churches were roughly the same.

McGowan's point is that news bias is less a conspiracy than a consensus, a shared worldview that allows journalists to drop their traditional skepticism when reporting certain kinds of stories. Vigorous media-bashers, hoping for evidence of malign intent, will find this explanation unsatisfactory, of course, But it is more than borne out in the best of the three books, "It Ain't Necessarily So: How Media Make and Unmake the Scientific Picture of Reality," by David Murray, Joel Schwartz, and S. Robert Lichter (Rowman and Littlefield).

The book opens ingeniously, taking us through a typical newspaper one morning in October 2000. On that unhappy day, there are stories about "new research" showing that coffee is a dire health risk, that trick-or-treaters have fallen victim to poisoned Halloween candy and will likely do so again, that domestic violence against women is growing worse - and much else. It is a bleak picture indeed.

Though allegedly verified by social science research, none of the stories on this typical day has been accurately presented in the media, as the authors demonstrate. In response, they've produced this guide for the perplexed, arming news consumers with enough knowledge to separate fact from fancy in science reporting.

Like McGowan, Lichter and his co-authors put little faith in the vast-leftwing-conspiracy theory of press misbehavior. The inspiration for all the hyped epidemics and frightening statistics and overwrought health scares is seldom explicitly ideological.

Once again, some media bashers may be disappointed to hear it. But they could use a dose of skepticism themselves. It's interesting to note that the grossest examples of bias included in these books date from the early 1990s and earlier-an era that may someday be deemed the high-water mark for political correctness in journalism.

Even now the tide may be receding. But not before we have one more chance to heave a shoe at Geraldo reporting live from Afghanistan.

Andrew Ferguson is a columnist with Bloomberg News.