Press Latched On to Snowden’s ‘Dropout’ Status
Edward Snowden has been characterized as many things in recent weeks, but journalists’ discounting him as a “high-school dropout” speaks volumes about media portrayals of education.
Pundits vs. Edward Snowden
There are plenty of people working in the media who don’t have much use for whistleblowers–and they’ve been having a field day going after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Cutting Social Security on PBS–From Left to Right
On the PBS NewsHour (4/12/13), the left/right debating duo of Mark Shields and David Brooks took up the issue of Social Security and “chained CPI”–and found that they didn’t have a lot to debate on the virtues of Barack Obama’s benefits-cutting plan.
Sometimes David Brooks Gets So Mad He Can’t Write Straight
When David Brooks writes that Obama “declines to come up with a proposal” other than raising taxes on the rich, and in reality he has proposed a plan, that merits a correction, right? Maybe. But when you’re a New York Times columnist, apparently you get to play by a different rulebook.
Jack Lew, One More Anti-Business Obama Appointee
Republicans and various right-wing commentators have had a thing for talking about the supposedly “anti-business” tilt of the Obama administration. It’s never made much sense–and it doesn’t make any more sense now that pundits are reacting to news that Obama will tap his current chief of staff Jack Lew to be his next Treasury secretary.
Politico Makes You Glad Election Is Almost Over
The gossipy, horse race-obsessed outlet Politico ran a story on October 29 about the credibility of polling expert Nate Silver, whose 538 blog at the New York Times is a must-read for people interested in election forecasting. What Silver does isn’t, on one level, all that tricky–his model combines national and state polls and generates probabilities […]
The Way to Voters’ Hearts Is Proposing What They Don’t Want
You often see pundits making suggestions to political candidates like David Brooks makes in his New York Times column today (1/10/12): If Romney is to thrive, he really needs to go on an integrity tour. He needs to show how his outer pronouncements flow directly from his inner core. He needs to trust that voters […]
‘Bard of the 1 Percent’ Sings the Same Tune
New York Times columnist David Brooks, who’s been called the “bard of the 1 percent” for his writings in defense of the economic elite, is at it again–telling people not to worry about the concentration of wealth at the very top of the income scale. Brooks writes in his January 31 column that the claim […]
David Brooks Gets Occupy Wall Street and Al-Qaeda in Same Sentence
New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a tedious column today (10/11/11) about how the real radicals are the centrists, not the Wall Street occupiers. (Read Dean Baker to see what Brooks is getting wrong.) But this jumped out at me: A third believe the U.S. is no better than Al-Qaeda, according to a New […]
Tea Party: Anti-Corporate Corruption Fighters?
Some in the press still seem to have trouble defining whatever it is that motivates the Tea Party movement. I noticed this in an L.A. Times piece last week (6/5/11): Americans possess a long-standing wariness of power and its potential as a corrupting influence, especially in the hands of large institutions. That instinct bred our […]
Edward Said on the ‘Clash of Civilizations’
It was great to see this letter in the New York Times from Edward Said’s widow (3/11/11): To the Editor: I smiled when I read “Huntington’s Clash Revisited,” by David Brooks (column, March 4). Eighteen years after Samuel Huntington wrote his Foreign Affairs essay “The Clash of Civilizations,” Mr. Brooks has arrived at a conclusion […]
A Whole Lot of Lone Nuts
Right-wing pundits have come out vociferously against the idea that they, their colleagues and the political movement they identify with have anything to answer for in the wake of the Tucson massacre. David Brooks (New York Times, 1/11/11) asserted that “the evidence before us suggests that [shooting suspect Jared] Loughner was locked in a world […]
Public TV’s Austerity Hour
As you may have heard, the White House-backed deficit commission failed to gain a supermajority vote to support a proposal from co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Their suggestions came under sharp criticism from liberal and progressive critics. Butthe December 3 broadcast of the PBS NewsHour, a short report on that failure was tilted heavily […]
Can They Pull David Brooks’ Pundit License?
New York Times columnist David Brooks is a regular on TV talk shows–including his weekly appearance on the PBS NewsHour (allowing the public to hear regularly from a widely syndicated columnist and commercial TV pundit, just aspublic TV was intended to do!). On a NewsHour midterm election post-mortem discussion (11/3/10), Brooks made this point about […]
The BP Spill Is Not as Complicated as David Brooks Wants You to Think
David Brooks (New York Times, 5/28/10) informs us that the idea that “government should have more control over industry” is one of the “predictably partisan and often puerile” reactions to the oil spill. The lesson that smart people derive from the spill, Brooks says, is “that humans are not great at measuring and responding to […]
David Brooks Thinks the Little Guy Isn’t Sacrificing Enough
David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist who speaks for the little guy who eats at the Applebee’s salad bar, has figured out (1/29/10) what Barack Obama ought to do: Force the country to accept common sacrifice. This is the issue that unlocks everything else…. Establish your credibility and offer to raise taxes on […]
‘You Can’t Write These Things About People You Respect’
Amy Wilentz has a strong critique of the media in her column in the new issue of the Nation (2/8/10). Starting with the New York Times‘ David Brooks (1/15/10; see FAIR Blog, 1/15/10), she demolishes his facile comparison of Haiti and Barbados (“Why is Haiti so poor? Well, it has a history of oppression, slavery […]
Heartless, Patronizing Haiti Pundits
While many are opening their hearts and purses to Haiti’s suffering, it’s important to note the corporate media’s high profile exceptions. Televangelist Pat Robertson, carried on Disney‘s Family Channel, suggested Haiti invited the disaster by making a deal with the devil 200 years ago (FAIR Blog, 1/14/09). Radio big Rush Limbaugh discouraged donating to Haiti […]
David Brooks’ Special Suburbanites
In his New York Times column, David Brooks cheers the rise of suburban independent voters in this week’s midterms elections, crediting them with Republican victories in New Jersey and Virginia. Brooks has made a career out of singing the praises of suburban Americans, all the while suggesting that they are somewhat ignored. While liberals and […]
NYT’s David Brooks Scares Up More False Figures
Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 7/21/09) has synopsized the latest fiasco of a David Brooks column under the headline “David Brooks Wanted Tax Increases to Pay for Stimulus”–since, Baker writes, “that is presumably the implication of his complaint that the Democrats paid for the stimulus package ‘with borrowed money.’” Predictably, “this is not the only […]
