David Brooks (journalist)

All you want to know about David Brooks (journalist)

The neutrality of this article is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page. (July 2008)
Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved.
David Brooks

Born August 11, 1961 (1961-08-11) (age 47)
Toronto, Canada
Occupation columnist, pundit
Website
New York Times columns

David Brooks (born August 11, 1961) is a Canadian-American[citation needed] political and cultural commentator. Brooks served as an editorial writer and film reviewer for the Washington Times,[1] a reporter and later op-ed editor for The Wall Street Journal,[2] a senior editor at The Weekly Standard from its inception, a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly, and a commentator on NPR. He is now a columnist for The New York Times and commentator on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

Brooks was born into a Jewish family in Toronto and grew up in New York City in Stuyvesant Town. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1983 with a degree in history.

He wrote a book of cultural commentary titled Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Brooks also writes articles and makes television appearances as a commentator on various trends in pop culture, such as internet dating. His newest book is entitled On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense.

Before the Iraq War, Brooks argued forcefully on moral grounds for American military intervention, echoing the belief of conservative commentators and political figures that American and British forces would be welcomed as liberators. However, some of his opinion pieces in the spring of 2004 suggested that he had tempered somewhat his earlier optimism about the war.

David Brooks was a visiting professor of public policy at Duke University's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, and he taught an undergraduate seminar there in the fall of 2006. [1]

Contents

Brooks in the political spectrum

Brooks, who some consider a conservative, describes himself as being originally a liberal. In 1983, for example, he wrote a parody of conservative pundit William F. Buckley, Jr. :

In the afternoons he is in the habit of going into crowded rooms and making everybody else feel inferior. The evenings are reserved for extended bouts of name-dropping. (University of Chicago Maroon, April 5, 1983.)

Buckley admired the parody and offered Brooks a job with National Review. A turning point in Brooks's thinking came later that year in a televised debate with Milton Friedman, which, as Brooks describes it, "was essentially me making a point, and he making a two-sentence rebuttal which totally devastated my point."[2]

On August 10, 2006, Brooks wrote a column for the New York Times titled "Party No. 3". The column proposed the idea of the McCain-Lieberman Party, or the fictional representation of the moderate majority in America.[3]

Many in the "conservative movement" such as Rush Limbaugh denounce him as he frequently runs to the left. He has long been a McCain supporter and has not shown a liking for Governor Sarah Palin, calling her a "cancer" on the Republican Party. [4]

Social views

Brooks opposes what he sees as self-destructive behavior like teenage sex and divorce; however, he is not a culture warrior in the traditional sense. His view is that "sex is more explicit everywhere barring real life. As the entertainment media have become more sex-saturated, American teenagers have become more sexually abstemious" by "waiting longer to have sex...[and] having fewer partners." He sees the culture war as nearly over, because "today's young people...seem happy with the frankness of the left and the wholesomeness of the right." As a result, he is optimistic about the United States' social stability, which he considers to be "in the middle of an amazing moment of improvement and repair." (New York Times, April 17, 2005, 4-14.)

Brooks also broke with many in the conservative movement when, in late 2003, he came out in favor of same-sex marriage in his New York Times column. He equated the idea with traditional conservative values: "We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity.... It's going to be up to conservatives to make the important, moral case for marriage, including gay marriage." (New York Times, November 22, 2003, A-15.)

Regarding women's issues, Brooks is a third-wave feminist. He has also positioned himself as an outspoken critic of the Assault Weapons Ban.

In a March 2007 article published in the New York Times titled No U-Turns, Brooks explains that the Republican party must distance itself from the minimal-government conservative principles that had arisen during the Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan eras. He claims that these outdated concepts had served their purposes and should no longer be embraced by Republicans in order to win elections. [3]

Controversies

Philadelphia Magazine controversy

In April 2004, Sasha Issenberg of Philadelphia magazine set out to retrace the journey through Franklin County, Pennsylvania, that Brooks described in the article "One Nation, Slightly Divisible" published in 2001 in the Atlantic Monthly. [5] [6] Issenberg uncovered several inaccuracies and distortions in Brooks's article. For example, Brooks wrote "On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal...I'd scan the menu and realize that I'd been beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and 'seafood delight' trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it." Issenberg discovered that, to the contrary, "I lunched at the Chambersburg Red Lobster and quickly realized that he could not have waded through much surf-and-turf at all. The `Steak and Lobster' combination with grilled center-cut New York strip is the most expensive thing on the menu. It costs $28.75."

When confronted with these inaccuracies, Brooks accused Issenberg of being "too pedantic" and of "taking all of this too literally".

Anti-Semitism remarks

On January 6, 2004, Brooks wrote a column in the New York Times that seemed to accuse critics of the Iraq war of anti-Semitism, claiming "to hear these people describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish Trilateral Commission, the nexus of the sprawling neocon tentacles" and that "anti-Semitism is resurgent". [7] Brooks later apologized to the paper's public editor for the column, writing "I am still on the learning curve here, and I do realize that mixture of a crack with a serious accusation was incredibly stupid on my part...Please do pass along to readers that I'm aware of how foolish I was to write the column in the way I did." [8]

Partial bibliography

See also

References

  1. ^ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/politics/political_wrap/bio_brooks.html
  2. ^ http://www.nytimes.com/ref/opinion/BROOKS-BIO.html
  3. ^ Brooks, David (2007-03-29). "No U-Turns". New York Times. Retrieved on September 13, 2008.

External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brooks_(journalist)"

No comments have been added.



Your name:

City:

Country:

Your comments:

Security check *
(Please enter the number into adjoining box)

 
up to content ยป

  • Ads

           
eXTReMe Tracker