Less than two months before one of the most important elections in U.S. history, a crisis of confidence in America’s political news media has spilled out into the open. The gist, if you haven’t been paying attention: mainstream media like the New York Times, Washington Post, AP News, and CNN and the three major networks have been failing America by failing to “meet the moment” of the Trump era. Rebecca Solnit provides a good summary in The Guardian: “While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new.”

“The elite mainstream media has lost its doggone mind,” writes Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “going after small daily clickbait like a puppy chasing its tail, demanding news conferences only to ask trivial questions, issuing ludicrous ‘fact checks,’ and desperately seeking gravitas in the candidate just found guilty on 34 felony counts and liable for rape and financial fraud.” There is the corporate greed factor, but Bunch sees problems with the profession’s “weird value structure, where it’s more important to be savvy, cynical, and not be portrayed as naive shills for liberalism than to care about saving democracy from authoritarian rule.”

The important dialogue about these failures is happening on social media—Twitter/X, YouTube channels, and, since the emergence of the Harris-Walz campaign, TikTok. This is ironic, because many of these sensible voices belong to older journalists who’ve aged out of the pay scale at legacy media jobs. What brought this cohort together with media academics and younger independent journalists is the both-sides-ism that tips the scale for Donald Trump and the relentless assertions of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. And this relatively professional community is growing by the minute with the support of regular news consumers who are equally fed up.

Among begetters of this moral hazard, the New York Times stands alone. To get a sense of the absurdity of the paper of record’s mavericky political headlines, have a look at the Twitter/X parody site New York Times Pitchbot. When Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos canceled his 32-year subscription to the Times in July, he called the paper’s news “a mash up of outstanding journalism and tabloid trash.” Though its general reporting standards are exceptionally high, the party line on politics, opinion, and what goes on in DC has gone off the rails.

The biggest problem is publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s twisted view about what independent journalism means in the context of creeping authoritarianism. Both the boss and his newsroom editor, Joe Kahn, think that making Trump appear less stupid, senile, and dangerous while holding first Biden and then the Harris-Walz campaign under an absurd microscope is the way to be nonpartisan.

This institutionally set narrative has superseded all election-related facts and figures since at least the beginning of the year. Thus, the headline writers amp up MAGA-friendly takes, Peter Baker and the political news clique live-post Dem-demeaning dings during important speeches, and Maggie Haberman offers the same platitudes in print and in stoneface on CNN to keep Trump always the center of the current news hole. Whatever this “sane-washing” of Trump’s words and actions is, it is not journalism.

Given all the scrutiny surrounding the Times’s political news machinery, I thought this would be a good time to look anew at an old truth that the initiated are expected to accept about elite journalism at the paper of record: that its core identity is more “elite” than “journalism.”

A February study by Harvard’s Nieman Lab found that 25% of 460 current journalists at the Times graduated from Ivy League schools. This was up from a 2016 study analyzing the backgrounds of 984 Times journalists, which found that 20% attended an Ivy League school, 50% attended an elite school, and more than half didn’t even major in journalism.

But this is only a fraction of the “elite” story. There are no stats on what these journalists’ parents did for a living; how many of them came out of college with no student loan debt; how many were bankrolled by their family to take unpaid internships; how many “worked” on presidential campaigns either in or out of college, meaning that someone was supporting them 100% for however many months they toiled unpaid for Howard Dean or Barack Obama. A century ago, you could be a gumshoe reporter for any number of newspapers and make a name for yourself, alongside the tweedy Harvard types at the Times who once in a while did the same. But today the only route is the elite pipeline determined by social class.

In light of the recent merger of the paper’s undemocratic political agenda with its tradition of a class-based work culture, I’d like to make a brief case study in the person of David Brooks, a columnist whose opinion beat seems to be all the things he doesn’t like about our shrill and vulgar world. If the Gray Lady were a ship, the mermaid figurehead with the big tits would surely be Brooks, a supposedly conservative writer who for a quarter century has earned his upper-middle-class paychecks from liberal readers of the Times, the same readership who buy his books.

This figurehead has certainly milked a lot out of an affluent culture over the decades. He’s a Reagan-era conservative who rode the neoliberal wave until it crashed on the rocks in 2008. He made a life of analyzing the tastes and hypocrisies of his own upper middle class, turning most of his acerbic prose onto members of the haute bourgeoisie with bohemian values—an update on Norman Mailer’s radical chic. The Times has other conservative critics—Bret Stephens, Ross Douthat, and David French—but Brooks is the only one old enough to have basked in the glow of Reagan’s America as a young elitist who was in all ways a WASP except for being a Jew. (He worked that out by converting to Christianity.)

Though Brooks’s brand is conservative-who-has-moved-left, his sensibility lies within the compassionate conservative America of George H.W. Bush, where the Greenwich elders of a certain social class had never witnessed a supermarket UPC scanner in action. These were the hallowed days before the Brooks Brothers brand had gone the licensing way of Pierre Cardin. This was Brooks’s Paradise Lost.

I present as my one and only exhibit Brooks’s September 5 column, the clickbait-friendly “Junkification of American Life.” Brooks had at some point read a great essay that Ted Gioia posted on his website in February. Half the column is Brooks describing Gioia’s essay, followed by an attempt to apply what Gioia says about art, entertainment, and distraction and addiction to everything in American life. The result, not surprisingly, is Brooks’s dismissive riff on someone else’s original thinking.

But this passage is the kicker: “We journalists go into this business to inform and provoke, but many outlets have found they can generate clicks by telling partisan viewers how right they are about everything. Minute after minute they’re rubbing their audience’s pleasure centers, which feels like a somewhat older profession.”

First: “We journalists”? I wondered if I missed some aspect of Brooks’s career in which he was a practicing journalist. I learned that after graduating from the University of Chicago in 1983 and before being offered an internship at the National Review (by William F. Buckley no less) in 1984, Brooks was a police reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago. Hence his 12-month “journalism” career, after which he was a movie reviewer, book reviewer, satirical columnist, cultural columnist, and political columnist for the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, and finally the Times. Seriously, dude: In what regard do you “inform” as a journalist?

Brooks built his career as a cultural mine-sweeper: he was good at glomming onto the intellectual trends parsed in Arts & Letters Daily. In the old days when he was more limber, he might hazard to intuit a trend when he saw something done three times. But at the Times, all he needs to do is wait for things to drift by.

Second: “telling partisan viewers how right they are about everything”? Dude, you followed the money across the aisle and embedded yourself with the enemy for the rest of your life. Bobos in Paradise (2000) was a bestseller that satirized the virtue-signaling brands and the way that affluent people spent their money in the 1990s. It could have been some kind of Final Club in-joke for reporters at the New York Times.

Third: “which feels like a somewhat older profession”? Who is he (wink-wink) talking to here, Erma Bombeck? And there are even more gems of this op-ed newswire vintage: “We could all be eating a Mediterranean diet, but instead it’s potato chips and cherry Coke.” “Think of all the things in American life that seem to offer that burst of stimulation but threaten to be addictive—gambling, porn, video games, checking email” (my italics).

He runs through three “buckets” of therapists’ advice to give the weak and lazy distraction addict some hope (his editor surely made him add this to avoid sounding like Cotton Mather) and ends with his usual sermon on God, patriotism, intellectualism, and enlightened morality.

So there you have it, life advice from the son of an NYU English professor who courageously plowed his own path in the world outside Manhattan, touching practically every elite institution on the East Coast as if he had OCD, and in the exalted role of “commentator” tells everyday people to toughen up so that they can fend off the dopamine lure of digital distraction.

What I think scares the likes of Joe Kahn and David Brooks are these “many outlets” (very many in fact) that Brooks mentions: the hoi polloi of digital democracy. What they fear is the end of the juried-selection-committee world where they know at least one member of the jury. Lesser legacy media have always fallen in line with the Times’s disdain for the “to the ramparts!” mentality of partisans. As one of my own Times-minded professor friends said, “Even if Trump wins, our institutions will save us.” I wanted to tell him: “Yeah, they will save you.”

I admit that as a writer who put myself through college and has been self-supported since I was 18, I bought into the idea of the meritocracy, believing it was the quality of your work that mattered, not the connections to affluence you cultivated in college. That meant I have always defended the juried-selection-committee world. But sadly I was wrong, and the entire system of Ivy patronage stinks. The world of David Brooks and the New York Times is predicated on learning and education, but they can never see let alone experience an anxiety for which the random bestowal of generational wealth and excellent parenting has made them immune. It makes me think of George Orwell’s 1941 objection to being governed by people who step into command by right of birth: “A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.” §