David Brooks doesn't understand journalism. Tom wrote about this below, but now that I've actually read the post I'm just completely flabbergasted by the willful thickness on display in it. Brooks says "the journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions, contradictions and vulnerabilities." Um, no. The journalist's job is to make the public more informed. Sure, in many cases exposing a politician's contradictions and evasions is a way to make the public more informed but saying that exposure is the goal of journalism is like saying the goal of the military is to shoot as many people as possible (Chris Hayes has some hypothetical questions that would make candidates very uncomfortable, but tell us nothing). Brooks' vision of journalism has about as much relationship to the real thing as Quake has to the war in Iraq.
Then Brooks says that "we may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall." I'm sure that has nothing to do with how those issues are treated in the media. He also says "it’s legitimate to see how the candidates will respond to these sorts of symbolic issues" Fine, but that's no excuse for spending more than half the debate dredging the most sordid and meaningless "symbolic" controversies. I mean, what exactly is gained by asking Obama whether Wright "loves America as much as you?" How exactly is that supposed to help anyone make a more informed decision about who should be the Democratic nominee? And, as dnA and Ezra point out, wouldn't voters have expressed such concerns in polls?
Finally Brooks gets to his most mind-blowingly self-contradictory point. He attacks the candidates for "simply irresponsible statesmanship (and stupid politics)" and for agreeing to "make blanket pledges." Never mind that the moderators (who Brooks gives an "A" for their performance), when they bothered to actually consider any actual issues, spent most of their energy badgering the candidates about whether they'd make just these kinds of blanket pledges. How could that possibly be helpful if, as Brooks says, these pledges are bad things?
More generally, Brooks's column is symptomatic of a type of journalistic vanity that is poisoning our politics. Brooks, like Tim Russert (if you haven't already, go read Paul Waldman and Matt Yglesias's awesome takedowns of the Russert school of journalism), Chris Matthews, and so many others, thinks that a journalist's success is measured by how much he or she embarrasses public figures -- by how many scalps they've collected and how many careers they've ruined. But that encourages a politics focused exclusively on the trivia of personal history, the parsing of ancient statements, and the most tenuous charges of guilt by association. Wouldn't we rather live in a country where the media focuses on what political candidates would actually do when in office?
--Sam Boyd
