Hat tip to Atrios for picking up on a story at BuzzFeed:
NYT Columnist David Brooks Resigns From Nonprofit After More Evidence Of Conflicts Emerges
David Brooks has resigned from his position at the Aspen Institute following reporting by BuzzFeed News about conflicts of interest between the star New York Times columnist and funders of a program he led for the think tank.
Eileen Murphy, a spokesperson for the Times, said in a statement that editors approved Brooks's involvement with Aspen in 2018, when he launched a project called Weave. But current editors weren't aware he was receiving a salary for Weave.
To make a long story short, Brooks had picked up a side gig for which he was getting paid — and the Gray Lady did not know. To make it even more egregious, he had some interesting connections out of the deal.
BuzzFeed News first revealed Brooks never disclosed to Times readers that he takes a full-time salary for his work on Weave, or that its funders include Facebook, the father of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and other wealthy individuals and corporations. Brooks recently wrote a blog post for Facebook’s corporate website in praise of Facebook Groups, a product that has often been a fount of misinformation and hate speech.
Among the troubling issues raised by these undisclosed connections are cases where Brooks name-dropped products of these funders during appearances on PBS NewsHour and Meet The Press or otherwise lent them the credibility of his name in other venues.
Read the whole thing.
The NY Times will be allowing Brooks to continue to pursue his interests in the Weave project as an unpaid volunteer, and will add disclosures to previous writings where he referred to it or the donors behind it.
It’s a bit disingenuous to treat Brooks as merely a conservative voice in the stable of opinion writers The NY Times maintains, given the complete collapse of the moral and philosophical foundations of conservatism and its descent into authoritarianism.
More often than not, lately Brooks appears to be trying to skate past the ugly truths now on display on the right. It might be more apt to consider him as a courtier, an apologist for the rich and powerful elites of the right even while he poses as a dispassionate commenter above the fray, gently scolding about things he finds ‘unfortunate’ while oh so sincerely appealing more in sorrow than in anger to the better angels of our nature.
Charles P. Pierce used to regularly dissect Brooks — his columns on Brooks include this 2012 gem from Our Mr. Brooks Finds Another Very Important Thinker, in which Brooks is very impressed with Charles Murray. A selection:
Brooks:
Since then, America has polarized. The word "class" doesn't even capture the divide Murray describes. You might say the country has bifurcated into different social tribes, with a tenuous common culture linking them.
Pierce:
(Indeed, you might say that, if you were David Brooks, and the economic catastrophe wrought upon the country by the people who pay for your dinners and your honorariums pretty much demolished your earlier, funnier work in which we were all living in our suburban nirvanas, slouched on our patios, cooking our burgers and buying cheap Chinese-made crap by the carload, and the only people who were fucking without your permission were the black people, who didn't really count. Indeed, you might say that, if you'd spent your entire career treating your fellow citizens as if we all lived in petri dishes for you to examine. Or, occasionally, for you to pretend to examine.)
Unless I am missing something, Brooks may be resigning the paying part of his relationship with the Aspen Institute, but will still be keeping his ties to it — and those funders mentioned at BuzzFeed.
Brooks will continue to grace the editorial space at the NY Times where he will be able to keep enlightening us with his views on ethics, class, elites, right wing populism, morality, the social order, and patriotism — complete with a pop culture reference in that last item, which is a classic Brooks smarm offensive.
Nice work if you can get it…