I don’t often have reason to praise any aspect of the New York Times, so I will take advantage of one that unexpectedly presents itself today.
Columnist Frank Bruni has a new article that calls out the members of the media pundit-ocracy who rushed to judgment against teen-age Catholics who were in the right place at the wrong time. In “Covington and the Pundit Apocalypse,” Bruni shows that anyone can learn — and for that we should be grateful.
I am reminded that I myself was a well-meaning liberal until 9/11 shook me to the core. It was from the post 9/11 experience that I learned the left did not love the country the same way I did and did not share my devotion to the ideals of our Founding Fathers that were under attack.
Today I hold out hope that, one by one, Democrats and leftists will see that they have aligned themselves with anti-American forces who aim to destroy everything we cherish as a people. Frank Bruni probably will never go that far, but you have to give him the chance.
Yes, he throws in enough qualifiers so that he doesn’t offend his liberal audience, but he also tells some hard truths about the people who used teen-agers as a prop to signal their own virtue as Trump haters. Here for instance:
To glance at Twitter as the video of the Covington teenagers went viral over the weekend was to see each pundit one-upping the disdain of the pundits who vented before him or her. It was also to wonder about the degree of preening and performance involved. They weren’t merely spreading the word of what had supposedly happened in Washington. They were seizing the opportunity for a fresh and full-throated reminder of their own morality and politics. They were burnishing their brands. And that self-interest was — and is — the enemy of caution.
Also give Bruni credit for not using the occasion to suggest he is better than the other pundits:
I’m not going to single out any particular pundits and tweets, because there were many and because, under different circumstances, one of those tweets could easily have come from me. As it happens, I missed this pile-on. But I’m sure that if I scrubbed my Twitter history, I’d find that I’ve behaved in the fashion that I’m lamenting here.
And Bruni is smart enough to realize that what the country witnessed last weekend in the rush to judgment will happen again:
… will we pause next time to make sure that we understand what we’re reacting to and whom we’re condemning? Even if that means fewer retweets? Will we filter our responses through a mature acknowledgment of what, in real time, we can and cannot take for granted?
Only if we’re honest about what we’ve been doing and why we’ve been doing it.
As we have seen, most of the left-wing media is constitutionally incapable of being honest… and so are his readers, as the comments after his story prove, but who knows, maybe Mr. Bruni is the exception to the rule. That’s my hope, from one Frank to another.
Frank Miele writes from Kalispell, Montana, at www.HeartlandDiaryUSA.com and is a columnist at Real Clear Politics. To see more of my columns about the Dishonest Media, the Deep Swamp, the failed presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and Trump’s war to restore American greatness, read my “Why We Needed Trump” trilogy. The books are available at Amazon in paperback or Kindle editions. Also please considering leaving a review in support of my conservative commentary on one or all of my book pages at Amazon! Thanks!
