Posted 8:53 AM by Scoobie Davis

More Amazon.com Follies
A couple weeks ago, I criticized internet pranksters who sabatoged the Amazon.com page for Slander by recommending Mein Kampf as a companion book. Amazon.com caught this and changed it; the new companion book is Bernard Goldberg's Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News (more on this). I received an e-mail concerning how pranksters sabatoged the Amazon.com page for a book by Pat Robertson. Apparently as a result of the Reverend Robertson agreeing with Jerry Falwell that gays and other groups are to blame for the 9/11 attacks, gay activists repeatedly clicked on Robertson's book Six Steps to Spiritual Renewal and an anal sex manual for gay men, tricking Amazon.com's automated recommendation system into connecting the two items as a reflection of shoppers' interests. Read more about the flap here.

Goldberg's book has a special place in my heart. As I told reporter John Cotey, I decided to start a blog after reading Bias. The reason: the book is a joke. One of the most absurd claims in the book was one of Goldberg's examples of media bias: the fact that people in the news media tend to refer to Limbaugh as a "conservative" talk show host but don't tend to refer to Rosie O'Donnell as a "liberal" talk show host--Goldberg thought this outrage was so blatent that he mentioned it twice in his skimpy book. As I and others pointed out, a simply content analysis of Limbaugh's show and O'Donnell's former show would clearly indicate that Limbaugh spends about 98 percent of his show discussing politics and O'Donnell spent 99 percent of her show discussing entertainment topics. Many on the right didn't notice these types of howlers in the book so I added my voice to the blogosphere to address these types of issues.