David Brooks

Several of you mentioned David Brooks’ column in Monday’s New York Times, and one even suggested I write about it. My initial response, of course, was that I will write about David Brooks’ column when he writes about mine. But on deeper reflection, it occurred to me that David has better things to do. I, on the other hand, do not. For those not familiar with him, Brooks is the Times’ conservative columnist and the right-of-center counterpoint to E.J. Dionne on NPR and Mark Shields on PBS. Hired by William F. Buckley at The National Review, he later wrote for The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard. Brooks, like his intellectual hero Edmund Burke, is a sober, thoughtful, intelligent, and insightful spokesman for moderate conservativism – a movement so diminished in today’s GOP that the Times later hired Ross Douthat to speak for the hard right.

Brooks has written admiringly of Obama, and while he speaks out against his policies often and forcefully, his criticisms seem born more of disappointment than dislike.

In Monday’s column, Brooks, writing in an unusual satiric tone, sought to parody the media’s depiction of Romney as rich, aloof and shallow. The piece was so out of character for Brooks and so edgy about Romney, however, that in lampooning the pundits, he also roasted the candidate.

David Brooks’ ideal candidate is one who is pragmatic, thoughtful and represents a conservatism that builds on the best traditions of the past – one like the old Mitt Romney, the governor of Massachusetts. But, whether in jest or not, that is not the Romney he presented on Monday.

Radio Talk

I was driving back on Sunday afternoon from a wedding between one man and one woman, channel surfing on my car radio, when I landed on a talk show station that had just broadcast a long interview with Mitt Romney. The station had asked Laura Ingraham to do a post-interview analysis of the speech and preview this week’s Republican convention in Tampa. Ingraham, the host informs me, is the most ”listened to” woman on the radio. She got right to the point. The interview, she said, had shown a man of strong principles and deep faith who is comfortable with himself. This humanized Romney could now focus on the state of the economy, a subject his opponent desperately wanted to change. All the Democrats have to offer, she said, is “higher taxes, more aborted babies and gay marriage.” That, she concluded, was not a winning agenda.

Now, I don’t often find myself in agreement with a Fox commentator, but I think she’s onto something. If that’s all Obama’s got, he is in trouble.

As I thought about Ingraham’s trifecta, it occurred to me it was actually the mirror image of the GOP platform, which calls for constitutional amendments on taxes, abortion and marriage. That’s a lot of fundamental changes to a document we are told has been sacrosanct since 1789.

Wouldn’t it be simpler to create a fair tax system that recognizes our obligations to each other and to allow each of us to make personal decisions based on our needs rather than the dictates of the state?

Aurora

The killings at the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, are a tragedy. For now, I don’t know what more can be said about them, and yet hundreds of reporters continue to turn out millions of words. The city of Aurora is under occupation, as news people seek some new angle, some overlooked teacher of James Holmes or neighbor of a victim, some anecdote that will create a headline.

Every detail will be analyzed for a clue to the motive of the shooter, to his state of mind. My 90-year-old mother keeps saying, “he doesn’t look like a mass murderer.” I know what she is thinking: that he is clean cut, nice looking, white – like Charles Whitman, who shot 48 people from the University of Texas tower in August 1966, like Ted Bundy, who raped and killed over 30 people. My mother doesn’t know what a mass murderer looks like, and neither do I.

We talk about life’s randomness, but most of us cannot stand it. So we grasp at any straw that will let us think we have some control, and we fit people into stereotypes that don’t exist. We hold vigils with recognizable icons – bouquets, teddy bears, the flag – which have become not just outlets for community grief, but national theater for the rest of us.

I believe that thoughtful insights will emerge from this tragedy over time, long after the nation has moved on from this obsession, leaving the victims’ families to cope however they can. I cannot begin to imagine their grief.

Murdoch

Here’s a man-bites-dog news flash, Rupert Murdoch is “not a fit person” to run a big international media company.

Who knew?

The discovery was made by a tri-partisan panel of Conservative, Labor and Liberal members of the British Parliament and issued yesterday in a 121-page report.

For those who have not followed the scandal that brought down Britain’s largest newspaper and threatens Conservative David Cameron’s Parliamentary leadership, it began with the discovery of telephone hacking at the now-defunct News of the World, and has since led to several arrests, the resignation of top editors and allegations of bribing Scotland Yard.

A majority of the Parliamentary panel accused Murdoch of “willful blindness” to the activities of his employees and therefore unfit to run the company. (Interestingly, the panel’s Conservatives, who supported the rest of the report, broke ranks on the fitness issue, which goes to the heart of the shameful relationship between the Murdoch empire and the Conservative Party.)

The report’s conclusion misses the point. Murdoch is not unfit to run a media business because he was oblivious his underlings’ activities. He was oblivious to their activities because he is unfit to run a media business.

The distinction is critical. Over his long – and financially successful – career, Rupert Murdoch has trashed every ethical principle on which the credibility of the media depends. He has used his properties to further his political agenda. He has cheapened the definition of news. He has valued titillation over information. He has traded his support for politicians for their support of his business ventures.

There are many reasons the newspaper business is in trouble these days, from the economy to the Internet. But none of them has done more damage than Rupert Murdoch.

Stumble of the Week

Fewer than 48 hours after James Murdoch had resigned as chairman of its parent company, the editor of Sky News announced that he had authorized his reporters to hack into private emails at least twice in the past – one instance involved John Darwin, the “canoe man” who faked his own death and lived for years with his wife on his life insurance payout; the other involved a pedophile. Far from manifesting contrition, John Ryley said, “We stand by these actions as editorially justified and in the public interest,” noting that the satellite news organization had turned the emails over to the police in what turned out to be a successful prosecution of crime.

To suggest that it is a role of the press to gather evidence illegally to aid a police investigation insults all the reporters who have gone to jail or worse for refusing to turn their work into a tool of the state.

Compare Ryley’s comments with those of Anthony Shadid, The New York Times reporter who was memorialized in Cambridge last night. Shadid also broke a law when he entered Syria to cover that country’s carnage. He died there in February. Shadid was an impressive and humble man, who said shortly before his death that he believed some stories were worth risking his life for . . . because they were important to get out to the world and it was his job to do so.

There is a chasm between Shadid’s journalism and Ryley’s.

On a lighter note, this stumble didn’t happen last week but I only discovered it last night: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34phsb4e6Eg

Courage

In little more than a week, three journalists have died in Syria, and a fourth lies in a makeshift hospital in the city of Homs, teetering between life and death. I want to pay homage to them simply by noting the courage it takes to do the work that they have done – and the importance of that work to all of us. They carry, not guns, but only pens, pads and cameras to record the stories of war’s victims. Not long ago, my friend Bob Caputo, who spent years as a photojournalist covering wars across the African continent, described trying to get into Mogadishu in the early 1990s to cover the Civil War in Somalia. His only way in was to hitch a ride on a plane from Nairobi that was carrying relief supplies to the war’s thousands of victims. Bob is a big man. With his equipment he probably weighed 250 pounds, which meant, he said, that if he were to get on the plane, 250 pounds of supplies would have to come off. And that raised the question: is what I am doing valuable enough to displace what that food and medicine could do? It was a moral gut check, and he concluded that the story of what was happening in Somalia had to be told to the world. When Bob finished talking, his cheeks were wet with his tears.

Anthony Shadid died last week, apparently of an asthma attack suffered while he was reporting from somewhere inside Syria. Two days ago, Marie Colvin, the one-eyed American war correspondent for The Sunday Times of London, and Rémi Ochlik, a young French photographer, were killed by rocket fire. French journalist Edith Bouvier may not make it out.

For more on Shadid, Colvin, Ochlik and Bouvier:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/world/middleeast/anthony-shadid-reporter-in-the-middle-east-dies-at-43.html?ref=obituaries

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/world/middleeast/marie-colvin-and-remi-ochlik-journalists-killed-in-syria.html?hp

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/american-reporter-marie-colvins-final-dispatches-from-homs/?ref=world

Stumble of (last) Week

For some reason, this did not go out on Friday. This Week’s Winner: The Press. In response to Wednesday’s post on “the luxury of candidates” to define the world so they can stay always on message, an old friend wrote: “I couldn't agree more. It's also the responsibility of journalists to ask the right questions.” The writer is a former journalist, who watched with resigned sadness the evisceration of the daily newspaper his grandfather had founded and his family had run for more than a century. A public conglomerate with no particular interest in the public trust role of journalism had bought the paper, slashed the editorial budget and ultimately killed the paper. That happened – and continues to happen – all across America, as corporate owners in search of a quick buck cut the heart out of newspapers.

The result is fewer reporters who even know how to ask the right questions, and few publishers who care. And because theirs is a profession that requires skill, courage and the time to dig deep, investigative reporters are an endangered species.

It is a profession that we desperately need – and it is one dangerous job. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 898 journalists have been killed since 1992 – 634 of those have been murdered. In many parts of the world, if you ask the right questions you end up dead or behind bars. The trivialization of the profession from both within and without insults those who still try to ask those questions, encourages those who would silence them, and deprives all of us of a vital window to the truth.