Progressive NYT Columnist Bob Herbert Is Doing God's Work ...

By T. A. Frank, Washington Monthly. Posted October 30, 2007.

The first thing you need to know about New York Times columnist Bob Herbert is that he's always right. No, not in the way a drunk in a bar is always right -- Herbert's genuinely right, or at least close enough that it'd be petty to look for exceptions. When the majority loses its bearings, Herbert sticks with the sane minority.

In the late 1990s, when the rest of us were being entertained by news of Clintonian indiscretions, Herbert had his eye elsewhere: "A level of terror unimaginable to most Americans has been the rule in most of Afghanistan since the Taliban took power a few years ago."

After the election of 2000, when pundits were asserting that Bush would have to govern from the center, Herbert was warning that Bush was "the incredible shrinking front man of the G.O.P." and that the heart of the party could be found in "Tom DeLay and his crowd."

In 2002 and 2003, Herbert bitterly opposed the invasion of Iraq, warning that "entrenched economic and social problems are likely to undermine even basic stability for years to come." During Iraq's 2005 elections -- a short-lived triumph that led Herbert's colleagues to pronounce themselves "unreservedly happy about the outcome" (Thomas Friedman) or to suggest that Iraqis had acquired the "habits of self-regulating liberty, compromise, tolerance and power-sharing" (David Brooks) -- Herbert was hardly euphoric. "What we saw yesterday was an uncommonly brave electorate," he noted, but also "a recipe for more war."

All well and good, but -- you protest -- the man is basically just a predictable liberal softie. Well, if that's the case, then tell me if you expected that Bob Herbert would be an interventionist hawk on Somalia in 1993, Haiti in 1994, and Afghanistan in 2001. Or that he'd say this shortly after the execution in California of Stanley "Tookie" Williams, cofounder of the Crips, in 2005: "I noticed that Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, Snoop Dogg and other 'leaders' and celebrities turned out in South Central Los Angeles on Tuesday for the funeral ... [That] tells you much of what you need to know about the current state of black leadership in the U.S."

And then there's Bob Herbert's main focus. He reports on the disadvantaged and disenfranchised of America, about whom he will tell you things you didn't expect. I doubt you knew that "nearly half of full-time private sector workers in the U.S. get no paid sick days. None." And have you ever been at a dinner where the tab came to more than $125 a person? According to Herbert, high school kids in Brooklyn can't believe this happens. "How much can you eat?" asked one. I know I experienced a salutary wince when I read that.

So let's recap: Bob Herbert is a sensible person who usually assesses things more accurately than his colleagues, regularly hits the streets to report on the world outside, shines a light on people and issues that deserve far more attention than they usually get, and tells you things you really ought to know but don't. But here's the catch: you don't read Bob Herbert. Or, if you say you do, I don't believe you.

The numbers are on my side. Take a look in LexisNexis and see how often various New York Times columnists have been mentioned (not syndicated) in other papers this year. Thomas Friedman gets more than 3,000 mentions, and David Brooks gets 2,650. Maureen Dowd gets 1,615; Paul Krugman, 1,179; Nicholas Kristof, 805. Bob Herbert gets 533. Web sites that shape national news coverage rarely link to him. ABC's The Note, one of the most insidery of Washington publications, has in the past few years referred to Paul Krugman 146 times, David Brooks 129 times, and Maureen Dowd 84 times. Bob Herbert? Twice.

Even liberal blogs that bemoan how liberals get outgunned by the right seldom discuss Herbert. Search the archives of Atrios and you'll find eighty-seven references to Friedman but only fifteen to Herbert. On Talking Points Memo, a search for Dowd calls up twenty mentions. Brooks and Krugman each draw nineteen; Kristof, thirteen; and Friedman, eleven. Herbert gets three.

More telling for me is what I pick up from peers. I've spoken to a couple dozen journalists of the center-left variety, and most, after insisting on being off the record or unnamed, confess to reading Bob Herbert rarely, if ever. "I've literally never heard someone say, 'Hey, did you read Bob Herbert today?' Never in my entire life," said one reporter for a Washington political magazine. Said another: "I haven't read him in years." The New Republic may have captured it in a recent headline for a hit piece on John Tierney: "How could a New York Times columnist be more boring than Bob Herbert?"

This bothers me. Bob Herbert is the only national columnist at a major newspaper who consistently writes about the issues in our country that matter most yet seem to be covered least. Arthur Miller, one of Herbert's favorite authors, once said that "Americans in general live on the edge of a cliff; they're waiting for the other shoe to drop." Many opinion leaders don't get this; Herbert does. In a sea of plugged-in, powerful pundits, Herbert is the lone unplugged spokesman for America's little guy. He's the delegate of the deprived. I could not admire his efforts more.

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T. A. Frank is an editor of the Washington Monthly.

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