David Brooks

The broadcast network evening and morning newscast blackout, of the Obama administration plan to force health insurance offered by Catholic charities and hospitals to cover sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs and contraception without a co-pay, continued over the weekend, yet the ABC and NBC Sunday morning talk shows took up the topic.

Meanwhile, the media double standard in ignoring the ObamaCare imposition on religious institutions while jumping to defend Planned Parenthood when Komen pulled funding, is being noticed by media observers ranging from from Fox News to even a New York Times columnist.

The cover story of Tuesday's USA Today blared "Resurgent Republicans close gap in key states." Susan Page reported a new USA Today/Gallup poll of 12 battleground states found "the number of voters who identify themselves as Democratic or Democratic-leaning in these key states has eroded, down 4 percentage points, while the ranks of Republicans have climbed by five points." GOP voters were also found to be more attentive to the campaign, more enthusiastic about the election, and more convinced the outcome matters. ABC, CBS, NBC coverage? None.

Gallup also found "Americans' concerns about the threat of big government continue to dwarf those about big business and big labor, and by an even larger margin now than in March 2009. The 64% of Americans who say big government will be the biggest threat to the country is just one percentage point shy of the record high, while the 26% who say big business is down from the 32% recorded during the recession." Network coverage? None. On Wednesday morning's Early Show CBS reporter Jan Crawford found only the Gallup result that would discourage Republicans:

Seattle-based New York Times reporter William Yardley made the front of the Monday Business section with a friendly interview with Kalle Lasn, the catalyst for the Occupy movement and the controversial editor of the Canadian “anticonsumerist” (how about left wing?) magazine Adbusters: “The Branding of the Occupy Movement.”

While crediting Lasn (pictured) for branding the Occupy Wall Street movement, Yardley went 19 paragraphs before mentioning Lasn’s inflammatory 2004 anti-Jewish attack on the Iraq War and neo-conservatives, “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?”

On the Friday news roundup on the PBS NewsHour, pseudoconservative analyst David Brooks of The New York Times kept up his disparaging of Herman Cain, predicting "he will be deflated very seriously within a week or two." He attacked Cain for "behaving badly" and having "gone for the home run" in denying all sexual harassment claims. Mr. Brooks didn't consider it at all possible that Cain could be truthful in denying all claims.

On both NPR and PBS Friday, Brooks lamented that Jeb Bush isn't in the race and would be the frontrunner pleasing both conservatives and moderates if he had chosen to make a run. He clearly has no respect for Herman Cain:

On the PBS NewsHour Friday, there was the typical agreement between "conservative" David Brooks and liberal Mark Shields on the sour state of the economy, and that despite that, Brooks said President Obama's "hanging in there reasonably well," and Shields agreed he's "defied gravity."

Brooks slammed Herman Cain's response to the incredibly vague Politico story: that he "didn't do kindergarten-level preparation for this story is just incredibly damning." Shields agreed, adding a slam on conservatives hating candidates with any experience: "Herman Cain's candidacy is a reflection, if not a direct product, of the feverish anti-government flavor, fervor of Republicans, because they really have so little regard, Republican primary voters, for government."

On Friday night's All Things Considered, the Week in Politics segment could have been titled "Another Horrible Week for Republicans." Helping out enthusiastically was New York Times columnist David Brooks, who is billed as the conservative half of the political analyst team with ultraliberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne. But the two end up agreeing so much you can't tell which one is the liberal.

When anchor Robert Siegel asked if this week marked the "beginning of the end of the Cain phenomenon," Brooks sneered that Cain was a "TV show that lasted a little while," and Dionne naturally agreed. Then Brooks turned to Romney and insisted he drops the emotional temperature of the room to chilling lows -- and of course, Dionne agreed.

New York Times columnists Gail Collins and David Brooks talked about “The Long Stagnation” in their weekly online chat posted Wednesday.

When Brooks, the paper’s idea of a conservative columnist, said he wasn’t impressed by the numbers participating in the Occupy Wall Street protest, compared to the figures generated at Tea Party rallies, Collins, the paper’s former editorial page editor, indignantly replied the Tea Party had no principles besides a "crazed" refusal to accept the idea of Democrats in power:

For the past month, as the debt talks slogged on in Washington, the so-called mainstream media unleashed increasingly hysterical attacks on the Tea Party and anti-tax hike conservatives — epitomizing the liberal elite’s supreme annoyance at the push to curb federal spending and contain the size of government.

The media’s disdainful language has ranged from the merely condescending (wondering whether the Tea Partiers in Congress actually knew how things worked, or referring to them as children), to outright hostile (likening the Tea Party to al Qaeda or other terrorist groups). Here are some of the choicer examples MRC has collected over the past 30 days:

Has Barack Obama lost New York Times columnist David Brooks?

In his piece Tuesday, the so-called conservative said the President last Friday "lectured the leaders of the House and Senate in the sort of patronizing tone that a junior high principal might use with immature delinquents...personalizing the issue like a spurned prom date":

People that have been watching Chris Matthews since the Republican presidential debate in New Hampshire last month know that the devout liberal has suddenly and quite mysteriously developed a soft spot for Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.).

On Sunday's "The Chris Matthews Show," the host actually said to his guests, "I wonder whether cerebral writers like George Will and David Brooks, bright people, are not really in tune with that base out there that she is" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Like so many members of the press, "Inside Washington" host Gordon Peterson wrongly thinks New York Times columnist David Brooks is a conservative.

When Peterson depicted Brooks this way on Friday, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer marvelously corrected him with surprising support from Politico's Evan Thomas (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Tuesday’s notorious column from the New York Times’s “conservative” David Brooks, “The Mother of All No-Brainers,” in which he accused Tea Party sympathizers of having "no sense of moral decency," is getting fulsome praise from staunch conservatives like Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Here’s Politico:

Reid, on the floor on Tuesday, gave his approval to many of the points Brooks made in his piece.

“I repeat: a conservative columnist said this,” Reid said, according to prepared remarks. “The Republican Party has been taken over by ideologues either devoted to or terrified by Grover Norquist and his no-tax pledge.”

Do Republican Tea Party sympathizers “have no sense of moral decency”? That suggestion comes not from conservative-loathing New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, but the paper’s chief “conservative” columnist David Brooks on Tuesday, “The Mother Of All No-Brainers.”

While omitting the phrase “Tea Party,” Brooks claimed a “faction” of the Republican Party was more interested in “psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.”

"Conservative" PBS/NPR analyst David Brooks was typical on the NewsHour Friday night, insisting strangely that "neither party" has a "growth agenda" and insisting that spending any second of your life talking about Sarah Palin is "temporary euthanasia."

JIM LEHRER: Yes, but, then why is she doing this bus tour?

DAVID BROOKS: She's in the media business. She's in our business, except for she has a bus.So -- and so, you know, I see no evidence she's going to run. I think every second we spend on her is a second of our lives we will never have back. So, it's sort of temporary euthanasia.

New York Times columnist David Brooks, considered by his Times colleagues as a Republican that Obama can do business with, has the persona of a sophisticate who may well admire the cut of the president’s jib (whatever that means).

But Brooks (or his copy editor) fell victim to the dreaded "damp squid" in his Friday column "The Big Society." The correct phrase is "damp squib," a Britishism for an event that fails to meet expectations.

The Big Society started in part as a political gadget, as a way to distinguish the current Conservatives from the more individualistic ethos of the Thatcher years. It has turned out to be something of a damp squid politically. Most voters have no idea what the phrase "Big Society" means. But, substantively, the legislative package has been a success. The British government is undergoing a fundamental transformation.

It certainly isn't a surprise that Nobel laureate Paul Krugman was far more pleased with the deficit reduction plan proposed by Barack Obama this week than the one unveiled by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) last week.

In Friday's New York Times column "Who's Serious Now?" the unabashed liberal declared the President's proposal "really serious" and the Congressman's "a sick joke":

As NewsBusters has been reporting, liberal media members have been out in force the past few days defending NPR.

On this weekend's "The Chris Matthews Show," New York Times columnist David Brooks said, "I thought it was really biased ten years ago, but now I think it’s pretty straight" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

David Brooks on Thursday said New York Times readers are more liberal than the journalists that write there.

During his videotaped interview with Time magazine, Brooks also explained how he tries to get this left-leaning crowd to read his articles (video follows with transcript and commentary):

New York Times columnist David Brooks Thursday took quite a swing at former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

During a videotaped interview with Time magazine, Brooks said, "I wouldn't let that guy run a 7-Eleven let alone a country" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham on Tuesday scolded New York Times columnist David Brooks for his snobby, elitist treatment of the Tea Party.

Ingraham began her admonishment, "Your judgment on the Tea Party has been fairly brutal" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Picking up on an argument made by economist Mark Zandi -- whom the Washington Post described as “an architect of the 2009 stimulus package” and who last year pushed for a second stimulus bill -- ABC’s Christiane Amanpour on Sunday morning, presuming there is an ongoing “recovery,” plugged a This Week roundtable topic:

Up next, Washington's answer to the job crisis. Will the deep budget cuts on the table stick a fork in the recovery?

In the subsequent segment, Amanpour forwarded: “$61 billion in budget cuts. Mark Zandi says 700,000 jobs will be lost.” Panelist Chrystia Freeland, global editor-at-large for Thomson-Reuters, agreed: “I think he's right.”

Echoing Amanpour’s theme, over on Meet the Press NBC’s David Gregory cited a poll to show “people want that focus on immediate job creation,” not budget cuts, “and that gets the President's point, which is you've got to get the balance right. You can't grow if you keep cutting so much.”

The March 7 Newsweek (NewsBeast) features an article titled "David Brooks Wants to Be Friends," but there's more bridge-burning than friend-making in this interview with James Atlas. Of course, he came up in Washington through conservative opinion journalism from the National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and The Weekly Standard, but "something has changed." Conservatives are now more uncivil. Well, either that -- or his paychecks are now signed by PBS, NPR, and The New York Times:

But Brooks insists that something has changed in the past decade. Political discourse had grown coarse, he laments. Gone is the civilized era when “you had liberals and conservatives instead of Republicans and Democrats,” a time “before the parties devolved into teams,” each espousing its own “values” in voices grown increasingly shrill. For a high-profile journalist, he seems eager to keep his head down—it’s not a posture easy to maintain when he’s on TV every Friday night and his byline appears twice a week on the op-ed page of The New York Times.

“One of the toughest things about being a columnist is that people hate you,” he said. Hate is perhaps too strong a word; it’s not a sentiment Brooks tends to evoke in people. On the contrary, his balanced views are seen as strengths, not weaknesses.

New York Times columnist David Brooks published a truly must-read piece Tuesday about what's going on in Wisconsin.

Unfortunately, out of some odd desire to appear balanced, Brooks advanced the totally erroneous liberal meme that Governor Walker's budget repair plan exempted cops and firefighters because they typically support Republicans:

On the PBS NewsHour Friday night, the show's liberal commentator, Mark Shields suggested the Republicans have no one to challenge Barack Obama: "The reality of the CPAC meeting is that there's 11,000 people there at the hotel registered for this conference. They're a constituency in search of a candidate. There is -- I mean, usually, it is a candidate looking for a constituency. They want to beat Barack Obama, but they don't have anybody."

In 2007, liberal commentators treated the Democratic field like an embarrassment of riches. They couldn't even be truly embarrassed by Dennis Kucinich. But now the Republicans have "nobody."

Naturally, PBS's allegedly conservative commentator David Brooks agreed: "I personally think there are really very few plausible candidates." He joked that Donald Trump would be the GOP nominee, then suggested Sen. John Thune was promising...because he was "an extremely good-looking guy." He said John McCain likes to say if he had Thune's face, he'd be president. Shields also slammed CPAC for failing to discuss Egypt all day:

The Washington Post has added a new conservative blogger to its stable, one that NewsBusters readers should be familiar with.

Only three days into her new position, Jennifer Rubin has made it clear she has no intention of toning down her criticism of mainstream media darlings like New York Times columnist David Brooks:

Politico's Mike Allen on Monday told Laura Ingraham the only way to do a piece about what Washington insiders are really thinking is to get anonymous opinions from unnamed sources unwilling to go on the record.

Less than 24 hours later, New York Times columnist David Brooks showed Allen how wrong he is in an article about what Republicans are feeling heading into Tuesday's midterm elections complete with the names of those offering opinions: