Along with the Blogosphere, HBO television producer (formerly of CBS, where he worked with Ted Baxter Dan Rather) Bernard Goldberg's books, first Bias and later, Arrogance have done much to reframe how we view the mainstream media, as I discussed in my two-part profile of Goldberg for Tech Central Station.

Goldberg has a new book coming out, and with a title like 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (and Al Franken Is #37), you know he's loaded for bear.

He recently discussed its central thesis with another Ed, Ed Morrissey of the great Captain's Quarters Weblog:

Look, I think whether somebody is a Democrat or a Republican, or a liberal or a conservative, I think we can agree – I hope we can agree – that we’ve become a nastier, less civil, more selfish America than we ought to be. And there’s a tendency to believe that, “Well, these things just happen, it’s the natural evolution of the culture, nobody’s really at fault, it just happens.”

Well, that’s not true. People really are at fault. There are real people with real names, and what this book is about is those real people who, in my view, are doing real harm to our country, in various parts of the culture. I touch on the media; that’s only one very small part of this book, a very small part. We talk about the Hollywood blowhards –

CQ: Right.

BG: I’ll go into each of these specifically, but let me just get the overview. Hollywood blowhards, which is a liberal institution out there. Intellectual thugs – nobody will disagree that colleges are run by the left, and these are people who impose speech codes. What’s liberal about that?

CQ: Right, exactly.

BG: The TV people who put on shows in prime time who put on shows that – at eight o’clock at night, I don’t want to have sit in front of the TV with my kids … You know, I say kids, but my son is older now, but people don’t want to sit there with there kids and watch one cheap sex joke after another. I will tell you, Ed, that I’m not the Church Lady. I don’t care at all how people talk or what people do in their private lives. What this book is about is the public arena, the public square and what’s going on in that area of our lives. In terms of private stuff, people can say and do whatever they want, I don’t care. But this is the public arena, and I care very much about that, and I think a lot of Americans are just fed up with what’s going on.

CQ: One of the things you touch on, you mentioned about not making judgments, and right in your introduction you write about that tolerance has turned into an indiscriminate tolerance. People must tolerate everything or be considered, like you said, a prude.

BG: Or a square.

CQ: Right.

BG: I think that may be the single most important sentence in the book, to be honest with you. Over the years, we grew tolerant of all the right things. We grew tolerant of civil rights, we became more tolerant of women’s rights. We became tolerant of various kinds of rights, and it was a good thing that we did. But over the years, we became indiscriminately tolerant. We became tolerant of crap! To tell somebody, to make a comment about this crap is to be judgmental somehow. And somehow, being judgmental of crap has become a bad thing.

Let’s talk about the TV stuff in particular. As I said, this used to be called the Family Hour. Now, it’s one cheap sex joke after another. But if you complain about that, you’re a prude, or you’re a square. You know what? This is why I come down harder on liberals than I do on conservatives, because the Left has decided to look the other way. They don’t want to complain about this, because if they do, now they’re on the side of the morality police. Oh, they couldn’t possibly want to be on that side.

So they make believe this isn’t a big deal, but you know what? The very people who care the most about the environment, as they rightly should, suddenly believe that what we put out in the cultural environment doesn’t mean anything. Air pollution means something; it affects how we live. What we put out into the culture means something, too, because that affects how we live. It affects the kind of America we live in.