Oh David Brooks, How You Do Me Dirty
Listen, I love some good political commentary as much as the next gal. I’ve been reading print newspapers since I was a small child — crawling into my grandmother’s lap to look at the funny pages of our local paper. Early on I developed a love of the editorial pages with its social commentaries. I was too young to understand the implications of the war in Iraq, but saw those commentators as the stars of the entire paper. The rare reporter mugshots were often saved for those pages, lifting their subjects to celebrity status.
As I began to curate my news intake, I started to read more and more of commentator and New York Times columnist David Brooks. Brooks is a masterful writer. He is technically strong, and each sentence seems carefully crafted. Your average Brooks sentence is succinct and to the point. Every sentence cuts sharply to the root of the topic. Most contain no more than one complete thought or elaboration. Ready Brooks is like inhaling through your nose at 5:30 am on a late October morning. It feels together and complete.
Brooks comes off as right leaning. A refreshing conservative voice breathing life into the conversation. He is a sensible political commentator whose no-nonsense personality and straight-forward thinking simply warms my heart. I almost always learn something from his articles and walk away pleased with what I had read.
Now I’m not sure exactly when this happened, but I started to notice it around the beginning of the Trump era. Brooks was making a fool out of himself. Just like it is never fun to watch your favorite Olympian get fourth, it is equally uncomfortable to watch one of your favorite commentators put his foot in his mouth. But Brooks did. And just like he does most other things, he did it like a star.
A common criticism about modern journalists is that they only ever talk to each other. They sit in their high towers and look over their realm of academia and shout to one another without ever engaging in the populace below. This is a valid criticism as journalism should be for the people. One can’t be for the people if they don’t interact with them.
Brook’s articles seem to embody this. They paint him as someone who is too smart for the rest of us. But if that is the case why do his articles seem to miss the mark so often? For those that are not followers of Brooks, I would describe my qualms with him concisely by saying that Brooks is just not “woke.” He sometimes writes things that make some wonder how he could be so unversed in the lives and experiences of others.
Brook’s view of the world as portrayed in his recent articles (such as Speaking as A White Male … and How We Are Ruining America) comes off as stagnant. Most of those articles are not ignorant in their entirety but contain parts that are wildly off the mark. Brook’s articles show why journalism needs fresh, diverse voices on the editorial page and in the news room. It’s not that what he is saying in his columns doesn’t deserve to be said, it’s that they come from a different era of reporting. One that was hegemonic and rife with co-opting. Stereotypes and generalizations pop up one too many times in Brook’s pieces for us not to take notice. Journalists and commentators need to be careful about how big their role is in media agenda setting. If prominent columnists are only looking at one side of the story how will the majority of people understand the subtle nuances in our society? Pieces such as Brooks’ are like microaggressions: on their face not blatantly awful, but still damaging to the cultural psyche at some level.
