During a NewsHour discussion of the latest video from Bin Laden, Brooks began his comments by saying:

I mean, on one hand, he’s a malevolent guy who killed 3,000 Americans. But you read this thing, and it’s like he’s been sitting around reading

lefty blogs, and he’s one of these childish people posting rants at the

bottom the page, you know, Noam Chomsky and all this stuff. (full transcript: ThinkProgress, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer)

The tendency of right wing pundits to equate Democrats and liberals with violent criminals, terrorists and genocidal dictators is a growing trend in the media.

This latest example, however, is not from the likes of right wing pundits typically associated with violent rhetoric, such as Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity. David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times and a regular guest on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

Brooks' comparison of Bin Laden and 'lefty blogs' represents a breach of professional responsibility and an offense to the viewers of PBS.

We call on PBS to take these immediate actions in response to Brooks' comment:

1) Publish an apology for Brooks' comments in a major U.S. paper

2) Remove Brooks from his position as a pundit for The NewsHour

3) Air a follow-up segment apologizing for Brooks remark

PBS is a public broadcasting network operated for the good of the American people. Pundits who equate large segments of the PBS viewing public with the most well-known mass murderer of recent history are a breach of the public trust given to PBS. As such, they should not be allowed to continue working at PBS.

On air political pundits equating liberals with terrorists has become a

serious and recurrent problem in American broadcast and cable

television. PBS has a responsibility to make sure this practice is not allowed to occur during their shows, and to take appropriate action each time it does.

Tell Them

The PBS complaint form:

The NewsHour is open to hearing your feedback, suggestions and concerns about the program, our Web site and our journalism. All inquiries, complaints and feedback can be sent to onlineda@newshour.org. These e-mails are lightly vetted for obscenity and spam and then distributed to NewsHour senior staff. Due to an overwhelming number of viewer e-mails we receive every day, it is impossible to respond personally to each letter as we would prefer to do. Viewers also may call our feedback line at 703.998.2138. U.S. mail may be sent to:

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Arlington, VA 22206 In addition, you may contact the PBS Ombudsman, Michael Getler, with your concerns and feedback at his site.





Update [2007-9-9 8:27:21 by Jeffrey Feldman]:

What Appears To Have Happened: Brooks Turned "9th-Tier Blog" Comment By Josh Marshall Into Smear Of "Lefty Blogs"

This is an amazing part of this story that I just now managed to track down. According to a story in the National Journal, right after ABC issued a transcript of the supposed OBL tape (there is some doubt about its authenticity), Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wrote a short piece in which he compared the transcript to the writings of a '9th-tier blogger.' Noting carefully what Marshall said is a very important part of this story:

I don't gainsay the danger or destructive power of the man. I still remember Rick Hertzberg's quote just after 9/11 that the attacks were as brilliant as they were evil. (This is from memory: so I may have the precise words wrong. But he well captured the way in which the horror and evil of the attacks were matched by their diabolical ingeniusness.) But as an articulator of a vision, an expounder of "Islamofascism," or whatever the new trademarked word is now, he's about as coherent and comprehensible as a 9th tier blogger or one of those whacks sitting on a stoop in Union Square talking about fascism and Texas oil barons before they get overcome by the shakes or decide to start collecting more aluminum cans. If my predictive powers are still working right, I'm sure I'll catch flack for taking such a mocking attitude toward this man who has so much American blood on his hands. (full post here)

Indeed, Josh's predictive powers were still working right, as Ann Althouse took him to task. Note, however, how Althouse makes a very clear distinction in her post between the right-wingers who are using the new tape to compare OBL to Democrats and what she sees Marshall has done in his post (it's a long quote, but it's important to see how Althouse responded to Marshall to understand exactly what Brooks did on The NewsHour):

An awful lot of the commentary on the new bin Laden tape is saying: He sounds like a Democrat. That's the meme from nonDemocrats. But let's not go over that already well-worn ground. Let's read what Josh Marshall has to say: I don't gainsay the danger or destructive power of the man. I still remember Rick Hertzberg's quote just after 9/11 that the attacks were as brilliant as they were evil. (This is from memory: so I may have the precise words wrong. But he well captured the way in which the horror and evil of the attacks were matched by their diabolical ingeniusness.) But as an articulator of a vision, an expounder of "Islamofascism," or whatever the new trademarked word is now, he's about as coherent and comprehensible as a 9th tier blogger or one of those whacks sitting on a stoop in Union Square talking about fascism and Texas oil barons before they get overcome by the shakes or decide to start collecting more aluminum cans. If my predictive powers are still working right, I'm sure I'll catch flack for taking such a mocking attitude toward this man who has so much American blood on his hands. But this, I think, is only the flip side of the vaunted perch we insist on giving him, a insistence that is a paradoxical part of Bushism. They are tacit partners in creating the world in which we now live. From me, you're going to first catch flak for writing "catch flack." "Flak" is WW II airman’s slang for shells being fired at you in the air, so to catch a lot of flak is to feel in danger of being shot down. However, most civilians these days have never heard of "flak," so they use "flack" instead, which originally meant "salesman" or "huckster." You need to worry about this only if you’re among old-time veterans. When you're showing off your expertise about fighting a war, you ought to get your war imagery right. A flack is a press agent. Hacks -- "writer[s] hired to produce routine or commercial writing" -- know more about flacks and not so much about flak, but they need to try not to let it show. (full post here)

OK, so what does this mean. It means that prior to Brooks going on The NewsHour, two discussions in the media were already ongoing: (1) right-wing news outlets saying that the Bin Laden tape reminded them of Democratic critiques and (2) a conversation initiated by a high-profile liberal blogger comparing the rhetorical style of Bin Laden's tape to bad writing found in less well-known blogs.

Enter David Brooks. It would appear that what Brooks was aware of both of these discussion and simply collapsed one into the other through a misreading of Marshall's comment. Where Josh compared Bin Laden's rhetoric to the bad writing found in a lower-tier blog, Brooks compared Bin Laden's rhetoric to the "angry" style of "lefty blogs."

The end result: Brooks used his high-profile spot on The NewsHour to turn the discussion of OBL's tape into yet argue that mass murdering terrorists have something in common with Democrats.

Update [2007-9-9 9:48:8 by Jeffrey Feldman]:

Another example of a high-profile blogger talking about the OBL tape and using language similar to Brooks, but not in any way smearing Democrats or progressive blogs.

On Sep 8, 2007 blogger Juan Cole put up a post titled Bin Laden Brandishes Jihadi Threat against US in Iraq in which he compared the new video to "leftist rhetoric." Notice what Cole says, though, and how different it is from cheap right-wing one-liners about OBL being similar to the American left:

Bin Laden is stuck in the 1980s intellectually, when he was used by one superpower (the Reagan administration) against another (the Soviet Union). That bipolar world is gone, succeeded by a period of unipolarism. Jihadis with $10 bn. in aid from the US and Saudi Arabia and a national cause are one thing. Jihadis with no superpower patron, no united nation, and little or no money just become terrorists. Ironically, Bin Laden has adopted the jejune leftist rhetoric of his erstwhile Soviet foes, making everything into a conspiracy of some corporations. But instead of calling for the workers to unite and overthrow their chains, he ends by assuring us that a fundamentalist Muslim dictatorship would be benign.

So, here we see a real attempt to compare OBL's rhetoric to something on the political left--turning to historical examples. What Brooks does, by contrast, is simply glom onto an already existing narrative from right-wing pundits--the tale about "lefties" really being on the side of the terrorists rather than the side of Uncle Sam.

The point: there's nothing wrong with talking about the left and Bin Laden in the same sentence. The problem is doing it in a way that feeds into the story about Democrats and terrorists as birds of the same traitorous feather.

Update [2007-9-9 11:3:37 by Jeffrey Feldman]:

DKos user NCJan reports in the comment thread:

George Will on ABC just compared the Democratic base to Osama bin Laden's video! He said that both are asking why Democrats can't end the war in Iraq.

Way to go parroting the talking points, George! BTW: Did you notice how Bin Laden also talked into a TV camera? That must mean that, you know, George Will and Osama Bin Laden are doing the same thing...

(cross posted from Frameshop)