The World According to Frank Bruni
En route from the New York Times to a teaching post at Duke University, the veteran columnist reflects on a decade of swimming in the "snide tide."
Photo: mali maeder, Pexels
Yesterday (June 17, 2021), on his way out the door of the New York Times after a decade spent as one of the most partisan columnists in the United States, Frank Bruni recanted. “I owe Ted Cruz an apology,” he wrote in his final column. “Though, really, it’s readers to whom I should say I’m sorry.”
And for what was he apologizing? For swimming with the “snide tide.”
I worried, and continue to worry, about the degree to which I and other journalists—opinion writers, especially—have contributed to the dynamics we decry: the toxic tenor of American discourse, the furious pitch of American politics, the volume and vitriol of it all.
I worry, too, about how frequently we shove ambivalence and ambiguity aside. Ambivalence and ambiguity aren’t necessarily signs of weakness or sins of indecision. They can be apt responses to events that we don’t yet understand, with outcomes that we can’t predict.
But they don’t make for bold sentences or tidy talking points. So we pundits are merchants of certitude in a world where much is in doubt and many questions don’t have one right answer. As such, we may be encouraging arrogance and unyieldingness in our readers, viewers and listeners. And those attributes need no encouragement in America today.
Surprisingly, perhaps, for a journalist whose tenure at the Times goes back 25 years, Bruni blames President Donald Trump for the decline in civility in American journalism:
Trump’s penchant for mockery gave those of us who covered him a green light to follow suit, and I was among many who seized on that permission. There wasn’t any shame in that, and it afforded us flights of verbal fancy that plenty of readers enjoyed. But there wasn’t any honor in it, either. We sank toward Trump’s level, and he cited that descent as validation of his hostility. The reciprocal ridicule went on and on.
Flights of verbal fancy, indeed—and good riddance to the sad, staid style of reportage that Bruni and his cohort inherited from the benighted squares of old.
I don’t miss the stodginess that defined a lot of news writing when I got into the business three and a half decades ago. It reflected an unnatural emotional remove and an insistence on even-handedness that produced a kind of moral zombie-ism.
Bruni is right about one thing. He’s not stodgy. He’s no Edward R. Murrow, or Walter Cronkite, or any other paragon of journalistic sobriety in whom Cold War-era Americans placed their confidence and trust in tough times. Indeed, under the tenure of partisans like Bruni, little remains of the “unnatural emotional remove” that characterized conventional U.S. journalism in its postwar heyday—the best evidence for which is that Americans’ trust in news media is today in freefall.
Among his professional regrets, Bruni claims to want to rescind his “rant” about Ted Cruz (noting that, in fact, it was a pair of rants). In yesterday’s op-ed he did not mention any other individuals at whom he has fulminated over the years—other than Trump himself, of course. But he is right to imagine that his acid pen has brought considerable consolation and delight to many a sympathetic Times reader, at least when he has taken aim at the usual suspects. Here are just a few of his choice phrasings:
On Ivanka Trump (July 2019): “Oh, to be Ivanka! The clothes, the kids, the teeth, the entitlement. She goes everywhere because she belongs everywhere—that confidence is in her platinum-encrusted genes—and because there’s no corner of the world or cranny of existence that isn’t enhanced by her presence.”
On Tucker Carlson (May 2021): “The amount of real estate that Carlson occupies in political newsletters that I subscribe to seems to have grown in proportion to the amount that Trump has lost…. And it proves that we need not just villains but also certain kinds of villains: ones whose unabashed smugness, unfettered cruelty and undisguised sense of superiority allow us to return fire unsparingly and work out our own rage.”
On Liz Cheney (May 2021, after she publicly rebuked Donald Trump): “[S]he can’t be discounted as a villain having a rare good-ethics day, just as she shouldn’t be anointed St. Liz. She refuses our tidy categories. How frustrating. How human.”
Again, Bruni is correct. There’s no “moral zombie-ism” in these remarks. There is, instead, cost-free grandstanding deliberately calculated, as Bruni himself acknowledges, to pillory “certain kinds of villains,” allowing him and his readers to work out their own “rage.”
Nothing in Bruni’s mea culpa would merit even the slightest attention outside of journalistic circles, arguably, had it not been paired with the announcement that he has “taken a job in academia” and will be splitting his time “between teaching and writing.” On July 1, Bruni will commence his appointment as one of two new Eugene C. Patterson professors in journalism and public policy, at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy.
And what is Professor Bruni likely to impart to his students? According to his swansong Times column, he has been careful not to limit his options:
I haven’t written about cancel culture, not much. Yes, that’s cowardice. But to cut myself a bit of slack, it’s also a reasoned response to a marketplace that isn’t big on reason.
I think that campuses have gone way too far in quashing speech they don’t like, but I also think that some speech is so intentionally injurious and flamboyantly cruel that refusing to showcase it isn’t the defeat of constitutional principles; it’s the triumph of empathy. No single edict can govern all exigencies.
This last excerpt is without question the most extraordinary in Bruni’s tortured mea culpa, the more so because it is so deftly crafted to give him political cover vis-à-vis the cancel culture he has until now been too cowardly to confront. To paraphrase one of Canada’s own famously shrewd wordsmiths: Cancellation if necessary, but not necessarily cancellation.
After years of “snide” columns—but none that were “intentionally injurious and flamboyantly cruel,” surely—Bruni will now take his place within yet another august Western estate, one that has been so riddled until recently with such “stodginess” and “unnatural emotional remove” as to render it a near-impregnable bastion of free intellectual inquiry. But alas, snide recedes, empathy triumphs, and nothing in the free-speech tradition that leading Times journalists might once have defended remains unimpeachable.
One apology does not a scholar make, but it’s a start. Let us hope that the wise minds running Duke University know what they and their students have signed up for. This is unlikely to be the last we'll hear from Frank Bruni.