David Brooks Calls on the Media to Do Better at Reporting on Conservatives, Tom Cotton Has Perfect Response

When Tom Cotton is on a roll, it’s best to not get in his way.

When last we left you, the Republican Senator from Arkansas absolutely owned CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin in a heated exchange about Cotton’s allegation that Big Tech and the mainstream media were “essentially ignoring” the New York Post’s explosive story about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the emails that were found on it.

Sorkin went on and on about how it was right for social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to censor the story because it allegedly hadn’t been corroborated, laughing as he suggested Cotton “wouldn’t want them to be reporting something that they couldn’t corroborate, no?”

Without missing a beat, Cotton calmly said this in response: “You mean like the Russian collusion hoax and the Steele dossier that you reported on for four years, Andrew?”

And as you may recall, earlier this year not long after the George Floyd riots started, Cotton had an op/ed piece published in the New York Times where he argued the only way to quell the violence in the Democrat-run cities where all the rioting, looting, and arson was taking place was by having President Trump invoke the Insurrection Act.

The piece greatly fauxfended certain New York Times reporters, who rushed to the Twitter machine to allege that allowing Cotton’s argument to be published in their paper put their black colleagues “in danger.” In the aftermath of it all, their editorial page editor was more or less forced to “resign.”

Fast forward to this week and all that has happened so far where the media, pollsters, and political analysts had their presidential election year “blue wave” predictions go up in flames – again. “Conservative” New York Times columnist took to the Twitter machine in response to the justifiable criticism of the above figures to scold his colleagues in the media for their “massive failures” at “capturing the rightward half of the country”:

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.

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) November 4, 2020

Cotton, who as usual was as cool as a cucumber, calmly replied back with this suggestion:

Maybe don't fire your editor for publishing conservatives. https://t.co/oSH23bDHY4

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) November 4, 2020

Heh. As of this writing, Brooks has yet to respond – and $5 says he won’t because Cotton was right on the mark.

Here’s the thing: While Brooks is right in his assessment, the problem is that the national media has proven that more often than not they aren’t willing to learn from their mistakes. For example, the MSM should have started viewing conservatives through a different lens after Trump won in 2016, but they didn’t. They just continued to run with the “racist/bigoted/sexist/heartless conservative” narratives because it’s what they believe. Not only that, but they also figure it’s what their base of readers and viewers want to see, too.

What they don’t’ seem to realize is that their base of readers and viewers would be far more expansive if these media outlets simply chose not to continuously insult the intelligence of the average conservative. The fact that they do things like that is one of the reasons trust in the mainstream media is at an all-time low and reader/viewer numbers have declined steadily over the years. It’s the main reason I refuse to subscribe to the Charlotte Observer anymore. Who wants to pay to be insulted?

It’s a bad business model, but they don’t seem to care because journalism in their view is about much more than reporting the news; it’s also about crafting biased narratives in order to advance left-wing political agendas, regardless of the serious damage it does to the credibility of the journalism profession – or what teeny tiny bit of it is left, anyway.