Category Archives: Media

The New York Times’ credibility takes another blow

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The new New York Times public editor has already stepped in it, it would seem. From Margaret Sullivan’s column yesterday:

Readers are quick to cite examples. Several who wrote to me thought there was an element of false balance in a recent front-page article in The Times on the legal battles over allegations of voter fraud and vote suppression — hot topics that may affect the presidential race.

In his article, which led last Monday’s paper, the national reporter Ethan Bronner made every effort to provide balance. Some readers say the piece, in so doing, wrongly suggested that there was enough voter fraud to justify strict voter identification requirements — rules that some Democrats believe amount to vote suppression. Ben Somberg of the Center for Progressive Reform said The Times itself had established in multiple stories that there was little evidence of voter fraud.

“I hope it’s not The Times’s policy to move this matter back into the ‘he said she said’ realm,” he wrote.

The national editor, Sam Sifton, rejected the argument. “There’s a lot of reasonable disagreement on both sides,” he said. One side says there’s not significant voter fraud; the other side says there’s not significant voter suppression.

“It’s not our job to litigate it in the paper,” Mr. Sifton said. “We need to state what each side says.”

Mr. Bronner agreed. “Both sides have become very angry and very suspicious about the other,” he said. “The purpose of this story was to step back and look at both sides, to lay it out.” While he agreed that there was “no known evidence of in-person voter fraud,” and that could have been included in this story, “I don’t think that’s the core issue here.”

It’s shocking to read a national reporter so casually dismiss the central point of his own article:

In the last few weeks, nearly a dozen decisions in federal and state courts on early voting, provisional ballots and voter identification requirements have driven the rules in conflicting directions, some favoring Republicans demanding that voters show more identification to guard against fraud and others backing Democrats who want to make voting as easy as possible.

The most closely watched cases — in the swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania — will see court arguments again this week, with the Ohio dispute possibly headed for a request for emergency review by the Supreme Court.

But this is the New York Times, after all. Even a column ostensibly criticizing the use of false equivalence manages to boldly reassert the practice by the bottom of the page.

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On sportswriting and sportswriters

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Nicholas Dawidoff admires how the very best sportswriters manage to wring meaning out of what is, ultimately, a triviality:

When writing about sports, you have to learn to navigate an odd literary predicament: Your audience often already knows the outcome before it starts reading. An editor at Sports Illustrated once advised me that the art of the work rested in telling people who already know what happened a story so compelling that they forget everything and, at the end, wish they’d been there. Not every writer can chance upon a famous athlete’s last game, as John Updike did for his peerless profile of Ted Williams. We won’t all encounter a young basketball player so committed to developing a sense of where he is on the court that he practices dribbling around lines of chairs with makeshift blinders in eyeglass frames (see John McPhee on Bill Bradley). But this editor helped me to regard sports as a parallel world full of little climaxes and telling details, just waiting for you to make the most of them…

Athletes, after all, are characters to a sportswriter, just as family members must be to a memoirist. You are responsible for them in full, and it’s particularly important to remember what brought you to them in the first place. What writers like Mr. Angell, A. J. Liebling, John McPhee, George Plimpton and the great Red Smith, as well as Sports Illustrated writers like Roy Blount, Robert Creamer, Frank Deford, Dan Jenkins, Ron Fimrite, Steve Wulf and — too many to mention! — share is the essence of good sportswriting: empathy. The appreciation of others is, for most, the reason to watch games, and it happens to be a noble human quality. Where too much recent American literature is less concerned with any search for meaning than the preening desire to be admired, really good sportswriting is grounded in curiosity and revelation, an enthusiast’s notes. And while few authors can compete with the reality, a writer can deepen it, preserve what happened and then mine it for the deeper human qualities at play that are the essence of lasting writing.

Meanwhile, Sebastian Stockman — who whiles away considerable column space on a very strange and only marginally germane tangent regarding the prevalence of Nazi references in sportswriting — bemoans the trade’s overarching lack of a wider societal perspective:

But no, Murray and Deford possess a self-awareness about their professions that Feinstein does not. That is, that the most interesting stuff in the sports world has to do with its stories, not its scores.

I would like to say that all sports fans know that, but we do not. For evidence, I turn to the letters page of the July 30 Sports Illustrated. One C. Fred Bergsten from Annandale, Va. has written in to respond to a book excerpt the magazine ran on that 1992 Dream Team. Here’s the letter:

With all the hype of the 20th anniversary of the Dream Team… most fans are forgetting that there were two squads, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, that could have given the Dream Team a run for its money had their countries not dissolved just before the Barcelona Games. The Soviets were the defending gold medalist from the 1988 Games, and Yugoslavia was the ’90 FIBA world champion. It is a tragedy that colossal matchups among the three basketball superpowers never occurred in ’92.

Yes, the tragedy of the Yugoslavian civil war was not Srebrenica, it was that the reigning FIBA champs didn’t get a shot at the Dream Team.

Personally, I harbor a fairly schizophrenic view of sportswriting. On the one hand, much of it — the stuff I tend to read, anyway — represents the worst kind of writing. In fact, one can say there is an almost inverse relationship between what people broadly consider good sportswriting and what they consider good journalism. In good sportswriting, heroes are continually made of men and women who pursue an irrefutably trivial career. In good journalism, even the best characters invariably have their flaws, or else all credibility of the writer is lost. In good sportswriting, the sporting events themselves are made into epic, and epoch-defining, moments in history. In good journalism, even the most classic drama is eventually dissected into digestible, often technical and highly detailed, pieces.

In short, there is a patent ridiculousness to sportswriting, and it is this quality that both draws me in and repulses me simultaneously. A sportswriter is, to me, someone who interprets the adage “the pen is mightier than the sword” as an unqualified exhortation to somehow combine the two. I inwardly mock these journalists’ labored metaphors but, in moments of glory for a team I happen to follow, feel inspired to ascend those very same mountains of linguistic bling bling myself. And in the meantime, I won’t feel guilty about reading them either.

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Journalism and the National Narrative

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The New Republic‘s Amy Sullivan is upset over Joan Juliet Buck’s new essay for Newsweek, titled “Mrs. Assad Duped Me,” which details the circumstances surrounding Buck’s glowing and ill-timed interview of Bashar al-Assad’s glamorous British-born and -educated wife, Asma, for Vogue in December 2010.

Sullivan’s takeaway:

But to read Buck’s account that way, to assume that anyone could have found themselves in her shoes, would be an insult to most journalists. Unless Buck omitted a boatload of admirable details about Mrs. Assad in this current piece or only recognized the creepiness of her visit to Syria in hindsight, she most certainly was not duped. She knowingly wrote a glowing profile—“the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies”—about the wife of a murderous tyrant…

Again, call me crazy, but Vogue had an opportunity here to run a killer story and to avoid becoming morally bankrupt. A report from inside Syria, inside the dictator’s home, on the eve of the Arab Spring? What editor wouldn’t run that blockbuster in a heartbeat over a strained puff piece about a pretty dictator’s wife? That view of power isn’t glamorous. But it’s honest.

Buck’s account, to which Sullivan is referring, is remarkably self-serving. Here’s one representative passage:

I should have said no right then.

I said yes.

It was an assignment. I was curious. That’s why I’d become a writer. Vogue wanted a description of the good-looking first lady of a questionable country; I wanted to see the cradle of civilization. Syria gave off a toxic aura. But what was the worst that could happen? I would write a piece for Vogue that missed the deeper truth about its subject. I had learned long ago that the only person I could ever be truthful about was myself.

I didn’t know I was going to meet a murderer.

But I think there are two things going on here simultaneously. One is fairly obvious, and the other less so. Firstly, Buck’s account is fairly transparently attempting to contain the (likely permanent) damage done to her journalistic reputation by her stenographic paean to the complicit wife of a brutal dictator. And no, I don’t mean “brutal dictator” in the even more obvious sense that it’s taken on since the onset of the Arab Spring, but even from long before. Describing him, rather generously, as an ophthalmologist and publishing pictures of him playing with his children doesn’t change the fact that Bashar al-Assad engaged in brutal, heavyhanded, oppressive tactics long before Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolated in Tunisia.

And Buck really does try to have it both ways. She simultaneously feigns utter naïveté — describing how Bashar al-Assad showed her his many cameras (“he didn’t strike me as much of a monster”) and later anguishing over Asma’s role in the brutal suppression of Syrian protesters (“Through 2011, I wondered about Asma al-Assad, the woman who cared so much about the youth of Syria. How could she not know what was happening?”) — even while casually analyzing the country’s political intricacies (“Damascus was home base for Hizbullah and Hamas; Syria was close to Iran. But these alliances also made Syria a viable interlocutor for the West, even a potential conduit to peace in the Middle East.”).

But the second element of this scenario, and the dynamic I find far more interesting, is Sullivan’s harsh critique of Buck’s self-described ignorance. If Buck’s self-justifying explanation represents an ill-conceived, long-shot effort to shield herself from the onslaught of public criticism, Sullivan’s comments are the mirror image: just another few extremely convenient and risk-free paragraphs to add to the mountain of condemnation for Buck.

I’m interested in the “risk-free” aspect. There is a curious dynamic at play, one that has been percolating in fits and starts ever since the Arab Spring began. Like it or not, those of us living in Western nations have had to wrestle with the uncomfortable fact that the dictators whose newly emboldened populations are now intent on eliminating their rule were, for all intents and purposes, strong allies of ours. This is true across North America and Western Europe, and the guilty parties are not few.

All it takes is a routine Google search to reveal a small library of photos of a smiling Colonel Muammar Qaddafi shaking hands, or otherwise interacting, with various European and American heads of government. The same can be said of Hosni Mubarak and others. This has made Middle Eastern leaders’ rapid transitions from ally — “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family,” Hillary Clinton famously said in 2009 — to brutal, repressive tyrant an especially awkward journey for their Western interlocutors.

But fortunately for our heads of state, the vacuum of reliable allies left by the forced departure of Arab dictators has been ably filled by an even more pliable replacement: the American news media. Nothing comes as easily as adherence to the National Narrative.

And this is what really irks me about Amy Sullivan’s high-minded putdown of Joan Juliet Buck. It is perhaps true that the Vogue columnist should have thought twice about running such an unqualified puff piece. It is also true, however, that this bears repeating for the entirety of the American press corps, whose largely mute acquiescence to decades of American alliances with cruel and brutal dictators was bizarrely abrogated the very moment those same leaders became personae non gratae to the Obama administration.

This is not to say that these alliances have not served their purposes at times. We live in a messy world; messy alliances are practically inevitable. But Buck’s case of bad timing is still, in some ways, a more honest journalistic effort than the 180-degree turn perfectly executed by the bulk of the American press without so much as a blink of the eye.

As George Orwell famously wrote, “We are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia.”

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Journalism done right, and writing done wrong

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First, for the good journalism, which I will quote at length (think of it as a counterexample to yesterday’s post about Jake Tapper’s misconception of media fairness):

Does any journalist who is not an overt shill for the right actually believe that Republicans are pushing voter ID laws because they’re concerned about voter fraud?

No, of course not.

And for good reason. Voter fraud simply isn’t a problem in this country. Studies have definitively debunked the voter fraud myth time and again.

In Pennsyvlania, which just adopted a tremendously restrictive photo-ID law that could disenfranchise 1 in 10 voters, state officials conceded they have no evidence of voter fraud, nor any reason to believe it could become a problem…

And the pursuit of this goal ostensibly in the name of voter fraud is an outrageous deception that only works if the press is too timid to call it what it really is.

For reporters to treat this issue like just another political squabble is journalistic malpractice. Indeed, relating the debate in value-neutral he-said-she-said language is actively helping spread the lie. After all, calling for someone to show ID before voting doesn’t sound pernicious to most people, even though it is. And raising the bogus issue of voter fraud at all stokes fear. “Even if you say there is no fraud, all people hear is ‘fraud fraud fraud’,” said Lawrence Norden, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

Think about it. If you were covering elections in another country, and one political party was actively trying to limit voting in the name of a problem that objectively didn’t exist, would you hesitate for a moment to call out that tactic — and question that party’s legitimacy? Hardly.

Modern American journalists strive for impartiality, but there is a limit. Mainstream journalists shouldn’t be afraid of being accused of taking sides when what they’re doing is standing up for basic constitutional rights. Indeed, the greater danger is that readers condemn them — or even worse, stop paying attention to them — for having no convictions at all, and no moral compass.

The GOP has taken increasingly radical positions, confident that the media’s aversion to taking sides will protect it from too much negative coverage. But failing to call out the voter ID push is like covering the civil rights movements and treating “separate but equal” as if it was said with sincerity.

And now, for the bad writing (on the part of Lehrer, not Moynihan):

Yesterday, Lehrer finally confessed that he has never met or corresponded with Jeff Rosen, Dylan’s manager; he has never seen an unexpurgated version of Dylan’s interview for No Direction Home, something he offered up to stymie my search; that a missing quote he claimed could be found in an episode of Dylan’s “Theme Time Radio Hour” cannot, in fact, be found there; and that a 1995 radio interview, supposedly available in a printed collection of Dylan interviews called The Fiddler Now Upspoke, also didn’t exist. When, three weeks after our first contact, I asked Lehrer to explain his deceptions, he responded, for the first time in our communication, forthrightly: “I couldn’t find the original sources,” he said. “I panicked. And I’m deeply sorry for lying.”

I don’t join the stampede of writers and journalists jumping up and down on Jonah Lehrer’s grave out of a barely concealed sense of schadenfreude. The amount of pressure and panic that he must have felt in order to do this had to have been immense. That doesn’t excuse it. But it certainly isn’t cause for celebration by anyone else either.

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ABC’s Jake Tapper takes on The Newsroom

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Actually, he took it on over a month ago, but I somehow missed it until just now. In the pages of The New Republic, Tapper took Sorkin to task:

There’s much to criticize in the media—and TV news in particular. But though “The Newsroom” intends to lecture its viewers on the higher virtues of capital-J journalism, Professor Sorkin soon reveals he isn’t much of an expert on the subject.

So far, so good. But what bothers me about Tapper’s critique is that he dislikes The Newsroom for all the wrong reasons. Here’s the crux of the problem with the show for Tapper:

McAvoy sanctimoniously laments the deterioration of public discourse and the news media’s complicity in it. But if that is the problem, his subsequent actions reveal a commitment to a uniformly partisan solution. McAvoy—and, by extension, Sorkin—preach political selflessness, but they practice pure partisanship; they extol the Fourth Estate’s democratic duty, but they believe that responsibility consists mostly of criticizing Republicans.

See, this is the crux of my problem with Tapper. I have a whole laundry list of complaints about The Newsroom — from the excessively preachy tone of all the dialogue to the half-baked and subpar romantic suplots to the improbably lucky connections the newsroom stuff was able to milk for details following the Gulf oil spill, and a million other things besides.

But if there’s one thing Sorkin doesn’t get wrong, it’s also the one thing that rubs Jake Tapper the wrong way. This is unfortunate, because — as someone who, admittedly, is not as familiar with Tapper’s journalism as I should be — I nevertheless have some unexplained fondness for the guy. But it appears something about Sorkin’s critique struck a little too close to home.

But before I get into that, Tapper’s not finished:

And when McAvoy goes after a National Rifle Association campaign to portray Obama as anti-gun, he insists on depicting it as a moral crusade in defense of the public good. But he never feels the need to question whether—in the midst of crises in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the international economy—it’s really so noble after all to devote one’s limited resources to fact-checking relatively unimportant political attacks. As such, it’s hard not to judge the resulting segment as falling short of McAvoy’s newly idealistic raison d’être—though Sorkin clearly seems to think otherwise.

Tapper goes on to say that McAvoy, much like other cable news stars, is blind to his own ideology. There may be a crumb of truth in that. But aside from the anchor’s comically atrocious disdain for the common people (“we are the media elite,” McAvoy declares on-air, without a smidgen of irony), it seems that the NewsNight anchor’s worst crime in Tapper’s eyes is assigning the truth any relevance at all. There are wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he says, and an economy in crisis. Why not discuss that?

But to those of us who would like to see something more from the news than a mere dash-to-the-bottom for the juiciest new storyline (another suicide bombing in Baghdad! stocks fall 2% in an afternoon!), it really does matter whether the NRA lied about Obama’s alleged anti-gun record. And it really does matter that Michele Bachmann falsely claimed the Obamas’ trip to India cost American taxpayers $200 million per day. (It would appear that even Tapper would agree with this last assessment: he filed a short report about the White House’s rebuttal of Bachmann’s claims.)

Tapper treats the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as completely separate entities from the “relatively unimportant political attacks” to which Sorkin’s Will McAvoy devotes so much of his time. But the aggregate effect of lie after lie being spouted by many vocal Republicans at the time, without any fear of being held accountable by the media, helped to fuel the popular discontent that has rendered Obama a much less effective president on both domestic and foreign policy issues. Political capital is a very real thing.

But that’s not actually the biggest mistake Tapper makes. Indeed, he believes some stories are irrelevant, and yet he and his organization, ABC News, continue to cover them indiscriminately. But the one thing they’ve forgotten to do right — and practically the only thing Aaron Sorkin actually got right — was to nail the coffin definitively on the constant stream of baseless attacks emanating daily from right-wing circles. (Tapper’s tepid report on the India misinformation story, especially given the update he tacked on at the end, leaves the impression this was just another political squabble between perpetually lying politicians. It wasn’t: one side was lying. The other side wasn’t. This matters.)

This isn’t about being ideological. It’s about doing the very thing Jake Tapper thinks he’s doing by focusing on the “moderates and liberals wielding [power]:” holding our elected officials accountable. This is not to say that liberals or Democrats or Obama himself shouldn’t be held to account either. But to simply assume that pointing out one side’s deliberate falsehoods is somehow partisan — without even bothering to evaluate whether the other side is actually guilty of the same crimes and to the same extent — is actually taking sides. It’s taking the side of those who choose to distort and disguise and deny the truth, at the expense of those whose attachment to facts is at least somewhat stronger. (These are all politicians, so we can safely assume no one’s that sentimental about honesty.)

Jake Tapper may be a good reporter, but his attack on Sorkin’s “moral crusade” smacks of New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane’s prejudicial term “truth vigilante.” Sorkin is a lot of things: preachy is one of them, for instance. But being evenhanded — as in a real balance based on facts, not the faux balance based on the terror of appearing partisan advocated by Tapper — is not something Sorkin got wrong. It’s something Tapper didn’t get right.

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The Newsroom slides further into the abyss

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I know I’m late on this, but I watched Episode 5 of The Newsroom a couple days ago. And wow, has that show ever jumped the shark. It’s gotten to the point where, if Sorkin and Co. don’t wake up soon and at least wink half-heartedly at the audience in some way, the show may rapidly devolve into a “hate-watching” fest (thanks to Victoria for that term) for everyone who bothers to tune in.

Also, self-plug: a slightly revised version of this post is now on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Religion & Ethics site. You can check it out here.

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A response to Steve Almond on our late-night political comedians

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Jon Stewart

Michael Potemra of the National Review Online takes issue with Steve Almond’s critique of the late-night comedy duo Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (previously covered here):

The Baffler writer…calls the work of Colbert and Stewart an “almost entirely therapeutic” attempt to “congratulate” the viewers, and criticizes the viewers for “accept[ing] coy mockery as genuine subversion.”

But what if we, the viewers, don’t want genuine subversion of the exact same things you happen to want to subvert? Furthermore, what if we don’t mind laughing even about some things we agree with? Both Colbert and Stewart make fun of some of my own political views. I was thinking of saying that I like them in spite of this; it might be more accurate to say that I like them, at least in part, not in spite of this but because of it — because I don’t want to live in a country where people can’t laugh at themselves, and where everybody takes himself and his own opinions as seriously as the Baffler guy seems to.

I don’t think this debate comes down to who takes himself more seriously. It’s about who you think Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are. If you think they’re simply comedians, you react as does Potemra. But if you suspect that behind their mock rage lies something a little more like…real rage, then perhaps you wonder, as Steve Almond does, why they don’t take that last, significant leap into hard-edged social commentary. Instead, we’re treated to the now all-too-familiar sight of Jon Stewart retreating behind the tired trope of “I’m just a comedian.”

Which he isn’t. Comedians generally don’t get CNN shows canceled. And they don’t play major roles in passing healthcare legislation for 9/11 first responders. Stewart, like so many of The Daily Show‘s hapless victims, wants it both ways. It’s just that, since he himself is the subject of this conversation, we don’t have someone funny around to point out his blatant inconsistencies.

Instead, we have Steve Almond. Where Potemra is right, I think, is in judging just how mainstream Stewart really is. Over the past few years, I, too, have wondered if Stewart were going soft. But more and more I’m guessing he was never that leftist to begin with. The Bush years presented fruit ripe for the picking, so it was easy to paint Stewart as a liberal. But now that a Democrat (albeit a fairly conservative one) is in the White House, it’s quickly become apparent that Stewart has little interest in pressing against the dominant strand of right-wing thought that’s gripped American politics over the last few years.

Like Steve Almond, I want Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to take up the liberal baton with more vigor. I’m just not sure if that’s who they are, or if it’s simply who I wish they were.

(Thanks to Andrew Sullivan at the always-excellent Dish for linking to Potemra’s piece.)

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Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America: are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert co-conspirators in the disappearance of liberal radicalism?

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Jon Stewart

A very worthwhile read, via Steve Almond at The Baffler:

Our lazy embrace of Stewart and Colbert is a testament to our own impoverished comic standards. We have come to accept coy mockery as genuine subversion and snarky mimesis as originality. It would be more accurate to describe our golden age of political comedy as the peak output of a lucrative corporate plantation whose chief export is a cheap and powerful opiate for progressive angst and rage.

In this, the “golden age” of Facebook Likes masquerading as activism, have we fallen prey to a massive ruse? One in which progressive rage is vaccinated little by little via 30-minute doses of harmless political comedy?

They’re not so convinced over at Vulture:

It seems like we have some version of this conversation every few years: Is Jon Stewart too easy on some of his guests? Yes. Do we live in a time when people are extremely reluctant to criticize members of the American military? We do. But is it really the role of all comedy, even political and media-centric comedy, to radicalize a population? Comedy can absolutely introduce political agitation. Must it, though? Are Stewart and Colbert asleep at the wheel because they’re not more like Bill Hicks?

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Censoring the news: this only happens in tyrannies and American presidential campaigns

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The New York Times nonchalantly (and unknowingly) begins writing its own obituary as a serious journalistic enterprise:

The push and pull over what is on the record is one of journalism’s perennial battles. But those negotiations typically took place case by case, free from the red pens of press minders. Now, with a millisecond Twitter news cycle and an unforgiving, gaffe-obsessed media culture, politicians and their advisers are routinely demanding that reporters allow them final editing power over any published quotations.

Image representing New York Times as depicted ...Quote approval is standard practice for the Obama campaign, used by many top strategists and almost all midlevel aides in Chicago and at the White House — almost anyone other than spokesmen who are paid to be quoted. (And sometimes it applies even to them.) It is also commonplace throughout Washington and on the campaign trail.

The Romney campaign insists that journalists interviewing any of Mitt Romney’s five sons agree to use only quotations that are approved by the press office. And Romney advisers almost always require that reporters ask them for the green light on anything from a conversation that they would like to include in an article.

From Capitol Hill to the Treasury Department, interviews granted only with quote approval have become the default position. Those officials who dare to speak out of school, but fearful of making the slightest off-message remark, shroud even the most innocuous and anodyne quotations in anonymity by insisting they be referred to as a “top Democrat” or a “Republican strategist.”

It is a double-edged sword for journalists, who are getting the on-the-record quotes they have long asked for, but losing much of the spontaneity and authenticity in their interviews.

Good thing the Times isn’t the most influential paper in the world or anything…because acquiescing to this absurd self-censorship would really be embarrassing if that were the case.

Perhaps this is a good entry point for the new public editor. Good riddance, Brisbane.

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David Brooks discovers inequality, recoils in horror

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English: David Brooks

From yesterday’s New York Times column:

Equal opportunity, once core to the nation’s identity, is now a tertiary concern. If America really wants to change that, if the country wants to take advantage of all its human capital rather than just the most privileged two-thirds of it, then people are going to have to make some pretty uncomfortable decisions.

So far, so good…right? Granted, Brooks is a little like the guy who shows up drunk to a party at 4 AM just as everyone’s sobering up enough to drive home. But at least he made it there, right?

Well, not exactly:

Liberals are going to have to be willing to champion norms that say marriage should come before childrearing and be morally tough about it. Conservatives are going to have to be willing to accept tax increases or benefit cuts so that more can be spent on the earned-income tax credit and other programs that benefit the working class.

Political candidates will have to spend less time trying to exploit class divisions and more time trying to remedy them — less time calling their opponents out of touch elitists, and more time coming up with agendas that comprehensively address the problem. It’s politically tough to do that, but the alternative is national suicide.

And there we go again with the false equivalencies. What does marriage have to do with inequality? Brooks prefers to look at cultural explanations, because cultural-religious rifts are his specialty. (“There are two types of people in America: let’s call them Big-Government Jack and Libertarian Jill,” would be a fairly representative rhetorical style of his.) But even though one huge reason for the current trend towards banana republic-ism is staring us right in the face — tax policy — Brooks prefers to look at something — marriage norms — that might influence something that might influence something that might influence something that might influence inequality. Ever heard of Occam’s Razor, boy?

What makes it so infuriating is that Brooks has a pulpit at the Times, and he consistently uses it to chide Obama for being too enthralled with the idea of government, too ambitious with his proposals, too far left for the nation. But then one day Brooks wakes up to discover inequality, and…yup, turns out marriage norms are the problem.

Time to wake up and start agitating for the policies Obama’s been proposing: sensible, reasonable (by any historical standard) tax proposals that attempt to reverse income inequality and restore some semblance of a little thing we call upward mobility. Call a spade a spade, David Brooks, or risk becoming another Tom Friedman. And the world doesn’t need another Tom Friedman.

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