Dan Gainor: NY Times columnist tells truth -- says paper 'not good at capturing rightward half of the country'

The New York Times doesn’t do a good job covering conservatives. That’s not just my opinion or the opinion of every sane conservative in America. It’s the opinion of the Times’ own nominally conservative columnist and celebrated author David Brooks.

On Wednesday, he tweeted out, “Our job in the media is to capture reality so that when reality voices itself, like last night, people aren’t surprised. Pretty massive failure. We still are not good at capturing the rightward half of the country.” 

This hilariously self-unaware statement was immediately mocked by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who commented, “Maybe don't fire your editor for publishing conservatives.”

Cotton had reason to snark. He got caught in a full woke meltdown by leftist Times staff back in early June for writing an op-ed they didn’t like. His piece called for the military to be sent to U.S. cities to help local law enforcement deal with “rioters and looters.” That was too much difference of opinion for Times employees and a good-ol’-fashioned, Marxist purge ensued.

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Veteran Times journalist, Editorial Page Editor James Bennet,  who oversaw the paper's Opinion section, was made to resign. (At least he didn’t get a firing squad, so the punishment was less than Times employees probably wanted.) His colleague Deputy Editorial Page Editor Jim Dao, who was overseeing op-eds, stepped down.

Times Opinion columnist and editor Bari Weiss was also forced out not long after Bennett and Dao left the paper but she got the last word — nearly 1,500 of them, blasting the paper’s “new orthodoxy” in a resignation letter. 

But Brooks’ statement was also reminiscent of what he wrote in 2016 after President Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in a surprise upset. “Not all, but many of my friends and family members were outraged, stunned, disgusted and devastated,” he opined, making it clear he had little in common with Trump’s voters.

And that was oddly similar to the disconnect that happened in 2009 when the paper completely missed other conservative stories in the early days of the Obama administration. The Times completely ignored the resignation of green jobs czar Van Jones, for example, until he was out and it gave a similar treatment to the Acorn scandal.

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Jones, who is part of CNN and a darling of the TV circuit, resigned from his post. Let’s see how The Washington Post described it: “Jones, who joined the administration in March as special adviser for green jobs at the CEQ, had issued two public apologies in recent days, one for signing a petition in 2004 from the group 911Truth.org that questioned whether Bush administration officials ‘may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war’ and the other for using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech he gave before joining the administration.”

So he was a vicious 9/11 truther and the paper never covered it until he resigned. That’s some fine journalism-ing.

To fix that problem, the clueless New York liberals at the Times committed “that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies.” Oh my. One whole editor to monitor “opinion media” -- their elitist way of describing conservative media.

So the Brooks’ comment after the election on November 4 is built on a firm foundation of liberal, coastal ignorance of the rest of America. But he still has to appease the paper’s leftist base — both readers and staff.

So what did he do? 

He later tweeted, “Controlling the Senate, Republicans are better off if Trump is gone.”

That makes sense to Brooks. He’s a cocktail conservative who probably only pretends to lean to the right at parties. He doesn’t appear to believe in any core position of the conservative movement any more than his openly leftist coworkers at the Times.

He naturally sees Trump as a problem, even though the president is wildly popular with the GOP base and has secured three conservative Supreme Court justices.

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Brooks, on the other hand, is reviled by the right he pontificates about.

Ultimately, Brooks works for the right place. Even when the Times claims it’s trying to connect to the right, all it really wants to do is push them to the left.

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