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Sunday Football Review: Frank Bruni’s “Life of Tim”

December 11, 2011   ·   4 Comments

Source: NYTX

By Marie Burns:

The New York Times‘ venerable Week in Review section disappeared this past summer. Its replacement is called Sunday Review, which suggests you can forget about the other six days of the week. Make that all seven. As Washington Post media critic Erik Wempel wrote, “… the Week in Review reviewed the week, and the Sunday Review doesn’t even review Sunday.” You might think Wempel, who works for a competing paper, was being hypercritical.

No, he wasn’t. At the same time editorial section editor Andy Rosenthal revealed that the Times would revamp the Week in Review, he announced that the Times‘ chief restaurant critic Frank Bruni would be writing a column “which will be a new anchor feature of the section.”

That’s right. The Times replaced the Week in Review with a section starring the restaurant critic. Bruni’s charter, according to Rosenthal, was to deliver “a sharp, opinionated look at a big event of the last week, from a different or unexpected angle, or a small event that was really important but everyone seems to have missed, or something entirely different.”

One “big event,” I guess, was New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s corpulence, which Bruni declared president-appropriate. Evidently an “important small event” was Kim Kardashian’s divorce. Bruni does sometimes write about politics in his Sunday Review “anchorman” role. In a September piece, Bruni left us with this takeaway: “If we persist in treating politics as a three-ring circus, we just might find ourselves with nothing but clowns.” Never thought of that. Thanks, Frank. In another Sunday column, Bruni wrote about government corruption in Italy and segued into a dissertation on the impact of aging populations in Italy and the U.S. Well, that sounds substantive. Unless you ask an economist: “This is one of those columns which could have been so easily prevented if the NYT just required a remedial 3rd grade arithmetic course for columnists that intend to write on economic issues,” Dean Baker wrote.

This week Bruni abandons his job of illuminating “an important event of the last week” to tell us how the Almighty is improving the Denver Broncos’ chances to make the N.F.L. playoffs. If you’re a believer, maybe you though God would be working more on world peace or African famine. Apparently not. Bruni assures us that “God [can] take credit for … the miraculous success of the Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow.” A good portion of Bruni’s column is devoted to explaining who Tim Tebow is and how the pro season is shaking out. That makes sense: since Bruni is writing in the editorial opinion section, it’s likely many of his readers won’t know – or care – about stuff that usually appears in the sports section. But let’s give Bruni the benefit of the doubt. Tim Tebow is an in-your-face evangelical Christian who uses his celebrity to tout his fundamentalist beliefs. He gets down on his knees and thanks God for touchdowns. And first downs. And completed passes. There is even a verb for Tim’s displays of devotion: “to tebow” is “to get down on your knees and start praying even if everyone else around you is doing something completely different.” Ah, the story must have a moral, perhaps something uplifting for the holiday season, which Bruni will hone with his “sharp, opinionated look.”

Sure enough, there are two morals:

One, Do not criticize Tim Tebow. This is not a “judge not” lesson. Rather, Bruni tells us that declaring that Jesus Christ is your personal savior every time you get in front of a mic is not as bad as assaulting women or burgling the neighbors, as some football plays do. Honest to God, that’s the message: proselytizing is better than felonious assault and burglary.

Two. Look on the bright side of life. Even though “It’s easy to be pessimistic about optimism,” that’s because “unctuous politicians” give optimism a bad name. “But optimism can have an impact. It’s what radiates from Tebow and fires up the Broncos. And therein lies a lesson about leadership with a resonance beyond football.”

So there you have the “sharp, opinionated look” at what “everyone seems to have missed.” Funny. I think I got all that from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” 30 years before I got it from Frank Bruni’s “Life of Tim.”

Andy Rosenthal announced Frank Bruni’s new job right after Frank Rich left the Times. Rosenthal told the Times staff: “He [Bruni] is a net addition to our lineup, not a replacement for anyone or anything.” Translation: Frank Bruni is no Frank Rich. I imagine everyone at the Times – or anywhere else – who reads the Sunday Review has figured that out by now. It would be difficult to write a more simplistic or less enlightening column than “Life of Tim.” If Bruni didn’t pass third-grade Rithmetic, he also flunked 3rd-grade Reading and Riting. I’ve read thousands of 3rd-graders’ essays, and many of those little authors could interpret a story with more acuity than does Bruni here. I mean that.

A month ago, Hamilton Nolan of Gawker wrote a post titled, “Against All Odds, Frank Bruni Gets Worse.” Fortunately for Nolan, now he can reprise the title. And not for the last time. Frank Bruni just does not seem to have a single profound or original idea. Never has. Prior to his restaurant critic gig – a job which requires little in the way of philosophical musing – Bruni was a political writer. He covered George W. Bush for the Times during the 2000 campaign and was a White House reporter for a few years after that. He wrote a book about his campaign experience. You might suppose then that Times management chose Bruni as the centerpiece for the new Sunday Review because of his keen observations on politics, sharp insights and polished writing style. Eric Alterman, writing in American Progress, speaks to Bruni’s prowess in that arena:

Bruni demonstrated almost perfectly how not to cover a presidential race and a new presidential administration. Indeed, if I were teaching a course on political coverage, one could use Bruni’s Times coverage of George W. Bush — together with his campaign memoir — as examples of what every young reporter should take heed to avoid.

According to Alterman, Bruni fell for Dubya.

But his affection was laced with a profound lack of interest — one might fairly call it contempt — for the issues upon which Bush took up a position. How else to explain an author of a book on a presidential race that contained barely a word about health care, Social Security, tax cuts, the Middle East conflict, missile defense, or, heaven forbid, global warming. In Bruni’s book, readers learned precisely how many seconds the Bushes danced at each of the inaugural balls, but precious little that would prepare us to understand what the president might be doing the next day when he went to work.

Alterman hypothesizes that Bruni was selected as the anchor for the new Sunday Review because the Times “simply does not care about the quality of its columnists anymore” and that the editorial section is “nothing more than a marketing tool.” The editorial section as “sales tool” may be part of the reason Frank Bruni has been thrust upon us. It explains why the Times got rid of the Week in Review, a section upon which busy readers relied for decades. I used to think of it as Time magazine for more serious readers: an in-depth short course for those who didn’t have time to read and ponder every story that ran during the week. Maybe the “metrics” are no longer good for old-fashioned high-quality journalism and critique.

The newsroom ran the Week in Review; the editorial department puts out the Sunday Review. The whole idea of this change was that the new section would feature opinion writers. So you’d think the Times management would focus on hiring good writers. You’d think they would care. Assuming they wanted the new section to be a success, only two other explanations for Bruni come to mind: Times management doesn’t recognize poor writing and “analysis” when they see it, or they never read Bruni’s political writings in their own paper.

Andy Rosenthal himself seems engaged in the news. I don’t know how much input he has into the editorials, but they are usually pretty thoughtful. The blogposts he occasionally writes are evidence he’s smarter than Bruni, more knowledgeable and a better craftsman. This makes me think Rosenthal didn’t have the last word on who would anchor the Sunday Review. The Bruni decision came down when Bill Keller was executive editor. Keller writes an opinion column every other week in which he demonstrates he isn’t particularly well-informed but is cock-sure of his opinions anyway. Publisher A. O. Sulzberger, Jr., has shown more interest in the paper’s bottom line than in the quality of the content. He is known to have participated in op-ed personnel choices. In interviews and public appearances, Sulzberger comes across as short-tempered and supercilious, neither of which is a sign his considered opinion is a well-considered one. I suspect that the reason Frank Bruni got his new job is less that the Times management doesn’t care and more that it doesn’t know any better.

Marie Burns blogs at RealityChex.com and until recently was a popular commenter on New York Times op-ed columns.

By marieburns

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