According to Nancy Kruh of The Dallas Morning News, veteran New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has been stuck in a rut for years. “For several months now,” Kruh writes, “as I’ve read one Iraq war column after another, one thought always comes to mind: Um, haven’t I read this before? So, yesterday, I finally immersed myself in Lexis-Nexis to try to quantify and qualify this phenomenon.”
What Kruh discovered is that many of Herbert’s columns during the Bush presidency contain similar, interchangeable passages. She cites a number of examples that make it seem like your average Herbert column is just a random recombination of wording from earlier columns.
I spent about fifteen minutes writing software that can generate Bob Herbert columns while using a minimal amount of our Earth’s precious resources.
Behold “Automatic Bob,” the Bob Herbert column generator.
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.
He reports on the disadvantaged and disenfranchised of America, about whom he will tell you things you didn't expect.
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.
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.
But, honestly, I don't read him either.
The point is that some columnists are influential because they're interesting, while others are interesting because they're influential.
I asked Herbert why he thinks his columns draw less attention in blogs and other media outlets than those of his colleagues. "The media tends to be drawn like a magnet to power," Herbert said. "Stories about power will generate more chatter." He added: "I think people who are in privileged positions either don't think a lot about people who are not, or don't care about them."
Clearly, then, Bob Herbert is at a disadvantage before he even puts pen to paper. Poor people plus statistics equals boring—we've got the science to prove it.
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