Captain Ed interviews Bernie Goldberg (No, not the wrestler).

Mr. Goldberg is a journalist and author of Bias, Arrogance, and 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (and Al Franken is #37), my Book of the Day.

Captain Ed is a major force in Bloggerdom. People in the real world actually pay attention to him. (Poor Ed.)

You can find both parts of the interview at Captain's Quarters:
Part 1
Part 2

Here is a sample from Part 2:

CQ: Are you going to put a blog site up, or a web site up, where people can send their entries?

BG: Well, Ed, I will tell you – and I tell you this with a great deal of embarrassment – that I’m not great at the Web, you know what I mean? I’m still finding my way, but I do have a website. There’s a place for people to post their opinions about things, including this. I will tell you flat out, it’s not Captain’s Quarters, but I’m new at this, Ed! You gotta cut me some slack!

CQ: [Laughs] Absolutely! I’ll make sure we post a link to that. Bloggers are going to be interested to find out that Markos Moulitsas made it to #52. What blogs do you read? What blogs do you follow?

BG: As I say, I‘ve got several jobs that keep me busy. I go to yours, I go to Power Line, I go to Free Republic … You know, I don’t want to offend the people I don’t mention. It’s just that I’m not as hip to this stuff as I know I ought to be.

CQ: Maybe you have more of a life. Some of us could probably use more of a life and less of the blogs.

BG: [Laughs] I’m not saying that! I know that will offend too many people.
CQ: [Laughs] Well, I’ll say it and let them be offended at me instead. Now, you’ve worked on HBO Sports [Real Sports] for years and I’m a big fan of your work there.

BG: Thank you.

CQ: I noticed that not too many sports figures made this list. Do you find them less consequential in terms of their ability to screw up America?

BG: No. I’ll tell you why. When you have a hundred names, on one hand it’s not easy finding the right 100. On the other hand, you could come up with a thousand names. I figured that the ones really doing harm to our culture are the big cultural figures, the ones I mention in the book. Sports and religion are the two things in America that we really get passionate about. I think we get more passionate about those two things than we do about politics, frankly. So I knew I had to mention somebody in sports, and I mention somebody who, frankly, I like as a player. I like his work ethic; I like a lot about him. He was an example of somebody I wrote about with mixed feelings. I didn’t sit down and write this saying, “Oh, great! I’m going to make this guy look bad.”

A lot of times, I had mixed feelings about the people I wrote about. In this case, when a guy’s worried about how he’s going to make it on seven million a year, I think he represents something bigger than himself. I think almost everybody in the book represents something bigger than themselves. What the sports reference represents, bigger than just the person I mention, is that a greediness has entered sports. Once upon a time, sports is where we went to escape, to have a good time, where we went to get away from all the crap we have in the culture. Now you find it there. You have a huge fight, and what happens when the fan gets caught? He says, “Well, I’m the victim here. Why should I get thrown out unless all the players are thrown out?” You get fans yelling all kinds of stuff in arenas. If you take your kids, you have to listen to people saying, “He dropped the f***ing football!” What have we become? Sports had to be mentioned, but I didn’t want to overdo it.

As a matter of fact, here’s the real point. I could have come up with this guy, I could have come up with somebody on steroids, I could have come up with somebody who’s violent, I could have come up with five or six or ten guys from the world of sports. I used the one I picked to represent the biggest problem in sports, and that’s there’s a disconnect between the athlete and the fan in a way that there wasn’t not too many years ago. Not too many years ago, players had off-season jobs. Now they make so much money that they don’t need it – which is fine with me, I’m a capitalist – but then they complain that they’re only making seven million dollars? Come on.

CQ: I was looking at your top 10 and I found it really interesting. First off, one of the entries – at least a couple of the entries, people won’t be terribly familiar with.

BG: Exactly.

CQ: Jonathan Kozol, being one of them, I thought was a tremendous teaching moment in the book, ironically. And Pinch Sulzberger. I don’t want to give away too much of the Top 10 here, I want people to read the book, but it speaks to the fact that you took this very seriously. This isn’t a just some glib, Late Night Top 10 kind of list.

BG: Thanks for noticing that. That’s a very important point, one which I can’t make, but I hope you will. A lot of the names on the list, the readers will recognize, but there are quite a few who they don’t know, or I think most of them won’t know. These are people who work behind the curtain, they’re not in the limelight, but they’re pulling all kinds of strings and doing lots of harm to the culture. I think one of the more interesting things about the book is how people will be introduced to these culprits who they didn’t even know existed. I think that’s a really important point, and I thank you, they way you said that, that it’s not just some Late Night Top 10 List. Yeah, there are famous people on the list, because they are screwing up the country, but there are people the reader will not know who are causing a great deal of harm to our culture. We need to tell the truth, and I think that’s what this book does.