As many of you know, I’m fueled creatively by my massive hatred of David Brooks. David Zwieg has a great article taking down one of Bobo’s new money lines:
It was one thing if Brooks made erroneous claims in a one-off lecture. It was something else entirely to put those same claims in a book. Now I had to get to the bottom of this…
It’s a good, thorough piece that shows once again that facts are for the little people. It touches on Bobo’s immense popularity with totebaggers and about his big applause lines at Aspen and on “Morning Joe”.
Here’s my question though: are we living in a golden age of pseudointellectual charlatanism or have things always been like this? I’m not enough of a historian to know. Certainly, idiotic ideas like Spenglerism took hold and did more damage than Applebees apocrypha are likely to do. But I wonder if the cut-and-paste simplicity of the internet, plus more figures available than ever before, plus the TED industrial complex, plus an awe-inspiring level of innumeracy among both media elites and their ostensibly educated but intellectually mediocre audience have made a whole new kind of bullshit possible.
Stillwater
are we living in a golden age of pseudointellectual charlatanism or have things always been like this?
Well, the entire mountain/desert west was settled on the premise that rain follows the plow, so …
Elizabelle
Hey DougJ. Good to see you.
Brooks seems to be trolling his readers these days. And his editors. How much can he get away with?
He’s inspiring some great reader comment rebuttals.
David Koch
I would bet less than 1/16 of 1 percent have any idea who brooks is.
but to make you happy, here’s the article of Sasha Issenberg uncovering him as a fraud.
DougJ
@Elizabelle:
I am surprised his editors are so lax
Kropadope
I’m not too familiar with the content of the reporting in the age of yellow journalism, whether they tried to cover their lies and biases in a pseudointellectual veneer. However, the results were the same; war and massive distribution of wealth upwards.
Lavocat
Lead or fluoride in the water, chemtrails in the air. Whatever. In the age where Google is a verb, you get David Brooks. Point, click, and spew. This passes for knowledge – better – wisdom. Just slap a logo on it and sell it. Facts? Facts are for losers.
Elizabelle
@DougJ: Maybe some of them are secretly commenting with rebuttals.
Dr. Krugman must be sorely tempted sometimes, but he’s pretty straightforward about calling Bobo out to his face.
srv
I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.
– Reinhold Niebuhr
DougJ
@srv:
Which ones are the cynics and which ones are the sentimentalists?
smintheus
@Kropadope: Things used to be even worse. Pseudo-intellectuals throughout the 20th century were free to flog almost any kind of nonsense they wanted without fear of being exposed as charlatans by anybody especially prominent or in one of the few magazines that had any power to shame idiots nationally. Nowadays the internet can hold frauds like Brooks responsible in a way that even 20 years ago would have been unthinkable.
jl
Article was funny when I read it. I guess nothing has changed since Issenberg wrote about him years ago. Except Brooks is so important and insulated now, he is unavailable to give snotty reporters lectures and intimidation about how checking Brooks’ reporting is unethical.
I remember in the Issenberg piece, Brooks used the Rush Limbaugh dodge: Brooks is basically an semi-satirical entertainer, and his readers understand that his ‘reporting’ should not be taken literally. I guess if you are real Brooks fan you get a secret decoder ring in the mail so you know when he is reporting facts and when he is just gassing away.
I think it is clear, and has been for quite a few years. Brooks is high tone Limbaugh style propagandist, simply sanitized enough to get a gig on public TV and radio.
SiubhanDuinne
Fixt, with a h/t to CPP.
Keith G
See ‘Phrenology’.
Mike in NC
Franchises of Applebee’s restaurants date to 1985, which probably dovetails with Bobo’s career as a rightwing stenographer.
joel hanes
For a vivid, unsparing, and largely accurate picture of Americans and their political views and sources of information as they were 170 years ago, read Twain.
The depictions of the people along the Mississippi in Huck are part of your answer.
(The town in which the “Duke” and the “Dauphin” perform “The Royal Nonesuch” is Every Little Town West Of The Appalachians. The Grangerfords and Shepherdsons are your rural Southern aristocrats.
etc.)
The descriptions of gold-rush Nevada and California in Roughing It are another part.
Twain only got away with it because he was a “humorist”, the John Stewart of his day.
Otherwise,
Americans have never stood for being confronted with too much truth about themselves.
See the poem “Carl Hamblin” in Masters’ Spoon River Anthology
http://spoonriveranthology.net/spoon/river/view/Carl_Hamblin
(in which “the anarchists” refers to the Haymarket defendants)
JDM
Be wary of any claim that our generation/time period is the _______est ever.
srv
@DougJ: And now you understand the Yin-Yang Bobo finds himself in, for he is both.
Blue Meme
Bobo is not content to rest on his laurels. Todays column is every bit as silly.
beltane
Every generation has its David Brookses. The reason they are so successful at promoting right-wing propaganda is that their readership of self-satisfied bourgeoisie is inherently conservative.
Larrybob
I think it’s always been as bad, that the “Wise Men” of the past got away with a lot because of the lack of instant rebuttal. You get the feeling that Brooks & Co. envy what Lippmann and the Alsops could get away with. On the other hand, what Brooks may lack in gravitas to those who came before he far surpasses in opportunities of monetizing his position.
Brachiator
As always, Dickens
NotMax
If the term babbling brooks didn’t already exist, it would have to be invented for doltish Davey.
fuckwit
@smintheus: I agree. YOu want to read some pseudo-intellecctual bullshit? I point you in the direction of Saint Thomas Aquinas and his ilk. The middle-age scholastic era was filled with nothing but pseudointellectual bullshit: the scientific method wasn’t yet established as a standard of measure. Also, too, the pope told you what was OK to conclude, and what was not, and if you didn’t agree you could find yourself strapped up in the air by your wrists tied behind your back until you agreed to what the villagers said was acceptably true.
jl
@efgoldman: Sorry my language was imprecise. That was Brooks’ line to Issenberg when Brooks tried to intimidate him. That was Brooks’ excuse for passing off BS as some kind of actual research and reporting.
My opinion is at the end of my comment: Brooks is a sanitized Rush Limbaugh.
Redshift
@DougJ:
I’m not. I know that when the WaPo editors were challenged about George Will repeatedly just making stuff up in his columns, they informed us without a shred of shame that columnists aren’t fact-checked. I don’t recall if the NYT has ever openly admitted it, but the evidence speaks for itself.
fuckwit
@efgoldman: He’s an unintenionally self-satirical reflexive parody.
beltane
I am nostalgic for the 1990s when there were many people who actually took Tom Friedman seriously.
mainmata
I wouldn’t conflate TED talks with Brooks-bullshit. Usually, TED talks are very different. Most TED talks I’ve listened to have been about opening up new and interesting and creative ways of learning about the world. Maybe you don’t like the medium but many people are exposed to a different way of seeing things from those talks. OTOH, Brooks is a boring, hypocritical mountebank that NYT should get rid of precisely because he doesn’t offer anything creative to the public discussion.
jl
@Blue Meme: That is better than average boilerplate from Brooks, with links. Maybe Brooks needed to point to a counterexample after the Zwieg article came out.
Let’s see if he keeps it up. I’m doubtful. Doing better than average bolierplate on TPP is easy, since it is kind of a cottage industry right now. As is true, to be honest, on the other side of the issue.
Edit: I am not accusing a man like Brooks, a man of such old-school character, of cribbing. But the piece does seem strongly ‘inspired’ by some other pro TPP pieces I’ve seen.
Gin & Tonic
Sure would be nice if there were a thread devoted to the basketball game. There were open threads for every hockey game in the finals.
schrodinger's cat
@jl: Actually, he is more of a stealth version of Limbaugh. The same pernicious BS, but with more obsequiousness. His mild manner is a great cover for really ugly rhetoric.
beltane
@Redshift: The NYT did get rid of Bill Kristol so they do have some standards, minimal as they may be. However, the fact that Kristol was hired in the first place tells you how low the bar is.
fuckwit
@mainmata: Mostly true; although there’s enough Randian techno-utopian glibertarian bullshit in TED talks to turn me off to them as a whole, there are gems of wisdom embedded in them from time to time and some of them are entertaining and informative. But mostly it smells to me like a geeky variant on a Tony Robbins seminar. And, like most things, when they first started out about 10 years ago the quality of them was high, but nowadays I get a much more mountebank/charlatan vibe from them on average. Even when the presenter and their work checks out, something about the slick, emotionally-cloying presentation triggers my bullshit detector most of the time.
RaflW
[sorry if this is a dupe. FYWP]
@DougJ:
I wish I could be that surprised. I actually think a number of us should write in to the Times about this, and PBS’s Newshour producers. Brooks has breezily been falsifying a key statistic for an extended period, and his publisher is being really bad about dealing with it (I’m sure hoping it will go away).
He’s already been documented as a b.s. artist by that Philly writer, but though I read that a while ago it seems not to have gained traction. I’m hopeful for traction now.
Major Major Major Major
Where’s my gorramn basketball thread
jl
I don’t get all the hating on TED talks either. You can pick different categories to watch. I stick with science and personal stories of community activists, and other similar things. Stay away from the categories with lots of ‘disruptive’ futuristic corporate friendly visionary BS.
jl
@Major Major Major Major: Saw headline on Yahoo that GS looks to clinch series in this game Doesn’t seem like that to me so far, though I am glad Golden State up by 10 in last part of 3rd.
Major Major Major Major
@efgoldman: let’s just thread jack this one.
Major Major Major Major
That was a hell of a dunk by GS.
Gin & Tonic
@jl: Doesn’t seem like that to me so far,
Things have changed in a hurry.
smintheus
@efgoldman:
Pre-internet, that was the role of Time magazine.
jl
@jl: in the past I have speculated that Brooks just types up stuff that various sources in his professional network (euphemism alert) give to him or tell him to say. I guess because too many random out-of-left-field howlers show up in his columns. Goofs that anybody who knew anything about the topic they were writing about would not commit, but also kind of oddball things that would not come to mind of a typical hack. The line that John Maynard Keynes was ignorant of math comes to mind.
I guess I should not speculate about whether someone might have handed Brooks the material for this column. That would mean on my part and show a lack of character.
Major Major Major Major
@Gin & Tonic: Cavs have a nasty habit of falling apart right around now…
Did you see LeBron with the giant bowl of bananas? I’d assume some sort of potassium beverage would work better…
jl
@Gin & Tonic: I don’t want to see a repeat of the second quarter.
Major Major Major Major
@efgoldman: the Warriors remind me of an old school team, or a college team maybe. Lots of strategy and teamwork as opposed to “give the ball to lebron.”
jl
@efgoldman: Same thing is bothering me too about where pro basketball is going. Not as bad as football yet, though.
John Revolta
@joel hanes: “Ain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”
Major Major Major Major
@jl: what’s the euphemism?
Gin & Tonic
So a fresh thread goes up, and it’s not about hoops either. I want my money back.
Elizabelle
@Major Major Major Major:
@Gin & Tonic:
The good news: fresh new thread just arrived.
The bad news: It’s about Donald Trump and drops the name “Palin” too.
But carry on about B-ball in whichever thread you prefer.
At least one of the basketball teams will emerge a winner. Same cannot be said about the overexposed Trump and Palin politiporn stars.
Kay
I think the scolding tone is new. I am so, so tired of being lectured on “how it is” when half of what they say isn’t true.
Lizzy L
Est. (Erhard Seminar Training. Remember?)
Scientology.
I rest my case.
CTVoter
My money is on a new kind of bullshit. The kind of bullshit that will never reach peak bullshit, sadly.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: I am sure Cole hates Cleveland because of the Stillers.
Elizabelle
@Kay: Yup. Scolding, largely fictional, and appearing on a variety of platforms, so the views seem more widespread than they actually are.
It’s one thing when Buzzfeed puts up unchecked crap. People expect more from the paper of record, and from Nice Polite Republicans and the Snooze Hour.
Gin & Tonic
That steal was awesome.
Elizabelle
Fresh PQED post from Jack Russell Weinstein. An actual philosopher. Unlike the error-prone fabulist, Mr. Brooks.
No one cares what kind of gun you have: an open letter to gun rights activists
Major Major Major Major
Yelling at the tv makes your team play better right
Gin & Tonic
@Major Major Major Major: Never worked for me.
Kay
@Elizabelle:
That he doesn’t see any problem with writing a book on humility and constantly lecturing people on things he knows nothing about is amazing to me.
Did you see this? I know you were interested.
Disney cancelled the tech worker lay-offs.
Omnes Omnibus
@Major Major Major Major: No, but strange rituals and the wearing of sanctioned team apparel helps a great deal.
Gin & Tonic
Iguodala!
Major Major Major Major
Haha you’re not supposed to kick the ball silly
Elizabelle
@Kay: Yes.
Although: this was 35 tech jobs at Disney/ABC TV in Burbank notified of their job loss in May. The NYTimes story was about 250 job losses at Disneyworld in Orlando already completed.
Although last paragraph mentions some of those employees have been rehired. Vague, very vague.
I think the whole debacle might blow up misuse of H-1B visas, and that would be a good outcome.
Gin & Tonic
This is beginning to smell done.
Elizabelle
The Orlando jobs went gone gone in January.
From tonight’s story:
I’d love to hear whether consumer avoidance played a part. Perhaps we shall hear from our mouse on the inside.
Origuy
I’m reading William Manchester’s The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932–1972. I’ve been reading the section on the Thirties. The political dialog that he describes sounds very much like today’s. FDR was “that man in the White House” to many of the 2% (the income distribution was a little broader then), even though his actions in his first term had saved their fortunes.
Major Major Major Major
Wow, a traveling call.
Gin & Tonic
It’s over.
Major Major Major Major
Uber is going to be very expensive in about ten minutes.
Tree With Water
@Origuy: Manchester fought as a Marine on Okinawa, and it was there while in battle he learnt that FDR had died. His wrote his reaction was, “my father” (in his book Goodbye To Darkness).
Evan
Perhaps you will be the hundredth monkey who stands up against stupid made-up sociological premises based on notions that sound appealing but have no supporting evidence.
I can only hope so, because if not, we might be like frogs in a slowly-heated cauldron.
Major Major Major Major
@Evan: actually, the frogs tend to jump out.
Major Major Major Major
100!
Kay
Also, I think he changed the date of the onset of “stupid, vain and lazy” from 1989 to 2005 deliberately.
Key to whining about how younger people are stupid, vain and lazy is making it a recent “trend” because if they they don’t do that they have to include a lot of powerful and influential people who may have been in high school in the 1980s- people like them.
The onset of our moral and intellectual decline must date to sometime after 2000. Otherwise most of us are in the bad generation(s) of Americans and why would we be so smart and hardworking and also humble if that were true? 2005 it is.
Gin & Tonic
@Major Major Major Major: Talk about notions that sound appealing but have no supporting evidence.
Elizabelle
I wonder if this could be trouble for Bobo. Misstating studies, and being so overexposed.
Could he be the thinking man’s Brian Williams?
Elizabelle
Yippee for Golden State. Congrats.
Major Major Major Major
And that’s that.
Elizabelle
“God is great. God is great.”
God don’t like Cleveland?
Gin & Tonic
Well, bedtime.
Omnes Omnibus
@Elizabelle: Have you been to Cleveland?
Gin & Tonic
@Elizabelle: Nope.
NotMax
@Kay
It tracks quite reliably with the increase in popularity of (plastic) bottled water.
Just sayin’.
Warren Terra
My impression is that in the early modern era – say, from when Queen Victoria got a fancy hat until Munich, more or less – was something of an age of wonder, with new things coming so fast and furious that it was often difficult to tell real discoveries from nonsense, and the latter propounded with a slick line of patter could do quite well indeed.
And then we get a real golden age of science: “public intellectuals” as such were probably often empty suits (Henry Luce, anyone? And has anyone ever been as much of a fraud as William Buckley?), it was an era of pretty close adherence to scientific fact, and respect for genuine intellectuals: Jonas Salk was a national hero, as for better or worse were Edward Teller and Wernher von Brain.
And now, we’re in a sort of post-truth era: it’s frauds all the way down, but intriguingly they’re not taking the place of the scientific authority figures of a generation or two ago. Instead, there is no truth – just opinion. And so the worst frauds are rewarded for their slickness, and not punished for their indifference to reality.
catclub
No reason not to expect them to be lax.
There was that whole episode with Bill kristol. he got dropped but they never fixed his articles, which were full of errors of all kinds.
Elizabelle
@Omnes Omnibus: Well. Its lake hasn’t been on fire for a while, has it?
Omnes Omnibus
@Elizabelle: River, dear. River.
Elizabelle
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh.
Omnes Omnibus
@Elizabelle: The Cuyahoga burned, not Lake Erie.
opiejeanne
@Omnes Omnibus: Have you been to Oakland?
Omnes Omnibus
@opiejeanne: Not recently. But it is a good point.
opiejeanne
@Omnes Omnibus: I had a costuming business when I lived in the bay area, and one job I got was to make costumes for the Warrior Girls for opening night, some sparkly little tear-away dresses. It was the year of the strike, 1997, and the year they got Mugsy Bogues. Bogues was about the best player on the team. It was also the year that Sprewell tried to choke Carlesimo during a practice. They were a terrible team, just awful.
They comped me 3 tickets to the opening game and we had a lot of fun even though they were so bad. There was one point during the game when one of the players found himself at the Warriors’ basket all by himself, holding the ball, and he just stood there. I yelled, “Shoot the ball!!!” It was during a lull in the crowd noise and he was facing me; it was like he woke up from a dream, because he looked down at the ball in his hands, and put it into the basket. I probably yelled something else at that player that was lost in the crowd noise, something uncomplimentary.
The most frustratingly awful game I’ve ever witnessed in any sport. Also hilarious.
The entertainment was like a variety show. The girls came out in blond pageboy wigs and these little sparkly A-line dresses, did a little dance number and then tore them off, threw away the wigs, and presented the new uniforms for that year. The director lost her job because of the “strip tease”. This, after they ordered really scanty uniforms for the cheerleaders, so bad that some of the girls cried when they saw them; management prided itself on presenting a family-friendly atmosphere. Idiots.
I met Nate Thurmond accidentally while I was working on that job; he introduced himself because he thought I was with the press and they were holding a press conference that morning. He’s 6’11” and it was astonishing to me at 5’3″.
Sherparick
@joel hanes: See the most recent conniption fit by WSJ opinion writer on the American Advance History standards for pointing out that most American Founding fathers were or had been slave owners and that Native Americans and African Americans may at certain times and places been treated not so well by white (Real) Americans. No one does a more constant job of tunneling through the darkness that is David Brooks then Driftglass. Sadly though, his trip down Brooks memory lane of lies is a reminder that “there is a Club, Brooks is in it, and we are no” as he appears bullet proof. Stuff that sent Stephen Glass into wilderness and unfit to even practice law, Brooks gets away with on a daily basis. But the art work on Driftglass’s web site is itself worth a sustaining donation to his web site (and since he is between jobs a way to sustain a progressive voice) http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2015/06/lies-damn-lies-and-david-brooks-ctd.html
Sherparick
@opiejeanne: Terrific story.
NorthLeft12
David Brooks is to journalism what Donald Trump is to politics and business.
brantl
It has always been like this; read Willliam F. Buckley, if you don’t think so. A louder, more insufferable idiot than Brooks, but the same general stripe. Full of shit, all the time, with a condescending insufferable sneer.
SFAW
@DougJ:
Good one.
On the other hand, The Editors never would be.
SFAW
@efgoldman:
To be fair, it’s probably a little more difficult when you lose the K-boys for the Champeenship series.
But I do like the “a bunch of guys named Fred” line.
ETA: Re-reading your comment, light dawned on marble head, and I realized we were in violent agreement. Guess I gotta brush up on my comprehension skills. Again. I HATE it when my braims stop working.
boatboy_srq
@JDM: Dunno about that. Some days it seems we have each of the last three (Boomers, GenX and Millenials) all competing for that exact title – the Blankest Generation Ever.
@brantl: @joel hanes: It goes further back even than that. What remains of Petronius’ Satyricon paints a not-dissimilar picture in Rome, and there are even older records from Greece of debates with comparable content.
Matt McIrvin
@smintheus: I was thinking about this recently in the case of the claims of a reactionless “NASA space drive” that violates conservation of momentum (actually a thing being tested by a small group of NASA employees working more or less independently of the agency, based on a crank theory). The Internet allowed the claim to spread like wildfire, but it also allowed interested people with some physics knowledge to look into it to such a degree that they could figure out the whole business was pretty dubious.
So has the modern infosphere abetted the nonsense, or not? In 1982 this would have been a thing in, probably, OMNI magazine, either a little squib in the kooky Antimatter section, or, if they were feeling ambitious, a feature article. And teenage me would have read it and not really known what to think of it, and vaguely wondered what was up with it for the next ten years.
On the other hand, fewer people would probably have gotten the idea that this was the next great physics revolution in their heads in the first place.
J R in WV
@jl:
“too many random
out-of-left-fieldout-of-RIGHT-field howlers show up in his columns…”FTFY