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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (52345)	7/1/2004 4:25:44 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793570

I think Brooks just wanted to sell his book. He should have stayed off O'Reilly in that case. DAVID BROOKS, SWAMP THING By Michelle malkin Just caught up on some TV viewing thanks to the (sporadic) wonder of TiVo. Bill O'Reilly conducted a fascinating interview on Tuesday night with New York Times columnist David Brooks. I'm attaching the entire transcript below (click on "Read More"). In brief, the conservative Brooks denied unequivocally that there's a liberal bias at his paper ("[T]hey have an ideology...It's the craft of reporting"). He backed the Times' hyper-hyping of the Abu Ghraib story ("It's defensible"). And he downplayed the paper's cheerleading for liberal talk radio station Air America: O'REILLY: They have no audience, and it's going to fold, soon. How do you justify 12 articles on Air America? BROOKS: Listen, I doubt all of those articles were positive. I... O'REILLY: Most of them were. Most of them were. I have got to dispute you on that. Most of them put this thing in a very positive, good- for-the-country light. BROOKS: Listen, they have their news judgment, you have yours, maybe I have mine. I'm an opinion journalist. You're basically an opinion journalist. That's why they don't pay us to be straight news reporters. Gak. What a cop-out! I double-checked the Times' Air America coverage and O'Reilly was dead on. All but three of the Times' dozen articles on the doomed station cast it as God's gift to man. It wasn't just the slant of the articles. It was the length and placement--for example, the 7,569-word, March 21 NYTimes magazine profile of Al Franken on the impending launch of the station; the three days of consecutive coverage on March 31 (1,403-word E1 article on the station's debut); April 1 (752-word article); and April 2 (755-word column); and the April 14 B3 939-word profile of station co-host Lizz Winsted. It's entirely understandable that Brooks wouldn't want to go on prime-time cable TV to unduly trash his employer. (He was, after all, just trying to sell his book.) But O'Reilly couldn't even get Brooks to agree on the most egregious cases of the Times' lefty proclivities. After O'Reilly gave up gently needling Brooks about the Times' institutional liberalism, Brooks volunteered this: BROOKS: Listen, you're not going -- I'm loyal to my people. I'm loyal to my colleagues... O'REILLY: I know. And I said that. I'm not going to... BROOKS: ... I admire them, I'm honored to be with them. "I'm loyal to my people?" Whhaaat? What about his presumed conservative principles? Does he feel no need to defend them when they come under incessant attack from his colleagues? Isn't that why he's there? Does he really want to spend the rest of his writing life cooking up oatmeal like this (registration required)? I enjoyed Brooks' writing when he was at the Weekly Standard, but the guy has clearly contracted incurable swamp fever. I speak from some experience on this matter, having served a similar role to Brooks's at the Seattle Times (the New York Times of the Pacific Northwest). I defended the paper when it deserved it. But I pointedly and publicly criticized my colleagues when they engaged in alarmism and selective reporting (registration required). What good is a "house conservative columnist" if he/she exempts the house from conservative criticism? I also think that conservative or contrarian columnists should not cower behind the label "opinion journalist" when they see their own papers and the rest of the mainstream media failing to cover stories--stories which they can and should break (reg. required) themselves in their valuable column space. As for Brooks, who is very good on the PBS talking head circuit (I subbed for him a few years ago and I was a nervous wreck), more than anything else, I feel sad. Sad that he has bought into the Times' illusion of inclusion. You see, another major lesson I learned from my experience at the other Times, David, is that no matter what their lips say, "your people" inside the newsroom will never admire you as much as you proclaim to admire them. michellemalkin.com