Tom Tomorrow points out an interesting new coinage: Googlestupid. It’s defined as the unfortunate tendency of someone to make pronouncements that are trivial to investigate with the Internet, and getting them wrong. This week’s best example is yet another bit of idiocy from the Times’ David Brooks, who is called out this week for a column complaining about two female pop singers (Pink and Avril) promulgating ideas in their lyrics hostile to marriage before 30 (this, in Brooks’ world, is apparently bad). The Googlestupidity is, of course, found in the fact that Pink, 28, and Avril, 22, are married.
Anyway, this particular example of Brooks being a lazy fuck brought another article to light, this one a fairly brutal deconstruction of Brooks’ famed post-2000-election Atlantic piece “One Nation, Slightly Divided,” which we read at the time and thought little of. The author, Sasha Issenberg, has no trouble documenting that Brooks basically fabricated nearly every supposed “division” between Red and Blue America, and did so in a way that was trivially easy uncover with the most cursory of fact-checking.
Brooks’ article hinges on the comparison of two counties near DC: Montgomery County, MD, where he lived, and Franklin County, PA, which was his stand-in for Red America. We’ve been to Franklin County; it’s decidedly rural, but not at all as far from suburban DC as Brooks would like us to believe.
For example, Brooks begins (as quoted in Issenberg’s piece):
“I went to Franklin County because I wanted to get a sense of how deep the divide really is,” Brooks wrote of his leisurely northward drive to see the other America across “the Meatloaf Line; from here on there will be a lot fewer sun-dried-tomato concoctions on restaurant menus and a lot more meatloaf platters.” Franklin County was a place where “no blue New York Times delivery bags dot driveways on Sunday mornings … [where] people don’t complain that Woody Allen isn’t as funny as he used to be, because they never thought he was funny,” he wrote. “In Red America churches are everywhere. In Blue America Thai restaurants are everywhere. In Red America they have QVC, the Pro Bowlers Tour, and hunting. In Blue America we have NPR, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and socially conscious investing.”
Funny, right? Also, sadly for Brooks, bullshit. Issenberg notes that one of Goodwin’s strongest markets is deeply rural McAllen, TX, and that QVC does profoundly well in urban, wealthy areas. But Brooks was too busy to check on things like “facts.” Issenberg, though, wasn’t, and took a trip to Franklin County to check things out for himself.
Issenberg discovered many things we find not at all surprising. For example, Franklin County boats both a fine Thai grocery and gourmet coffee company (we’ve been there as well). Notwithstanding Brooks’ assertion about Red American and Woody Allen, it turned out he couldn’t rent Annie Hall at the Chambersburg Blockbuster, but only because someone had beaten him to it. Even more absurdly, Brooks had claimed he was unable to spend more than $20 on dinner anywhere in Franklin County, and further called out their Red Lobster by name as one location where he tried. Issenberg found, as any normal human knows, that Red Lobster’s menu includes plenty of options to get a single dinner tab over that mark, including a surf-and-turf for $28.75. We’ve spent many evenings eating in that area, and can tell you from personal experience that keeping a dinner tab below $20 would be the real trick — i.e., just like anywhere else in the country.
The inescapable conclusion is that Brooks basically just makes shit up; Issenberg’s money quote:
As I made my journey, it became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home.
This comes as no surprise to anyone who’s read him or his babble for the last several years, of course. Brooks, of course, didn’t see it this way, and clearly tried to intimidate Issenberg:
I called Brooks to see if I was misreading his work. I told him about my trip to Franklin County, and the ease with which I was able to spend $20 on a meal. He laughed. “I didn’t see it when I was there, but it’s true, you can get a nice meal at the Mercersburg Inn,” he said. I said it was just as easy at Red Lobster. “That was partially to make a point that if Red Lobster is your upper end … ” he replied, his voice trailing away. “That was partially tongue-in-cheek, but I did have several mini-dinners there, and I never topped $20.”
I went through some of the other instances where he made declarations that appeared insupportable. He accused me of being “too pedantic,” of “taking all of this too literally,” of “taking a joke and distorting it.” “That’s totally unethical,” he said.
“Unethical,” Mr. Brooks, is making up facts. Brooks turns out to be employing a novel “rings true” standard, which we’re sure would be at home in any Yellow Peril article from 1885 or Jim Crow editorial from 1955, but falls a bit short of modern journalistic standards, even for editorial writers. Brooks isn’t the only one doing this, but its our dollars that keep him employed and read at his rarefied level. It’s certainly not news that people like to read what the recognize, and accept and reward “analysis” that confirms prejudices, but we’d hope that the gatekeepers in the “old media” would at least make some cursory efforts toward quality control. We know the hope is vain, but we keep it anyway.