David Brooks on the media's Trump business model, and Emily Jashinsky's deeper diagnosis
The former New York Times columnist's critique of his own profession became her most watched new upload in some time, well ahead of her takes on Zach Bryan and Mark Ruffalo from the same day.
After Party with Emily Jashinsky
Story of Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 43,012 views a day, 9.5 times a normal first day on this channel (4,506).
David Brooks Reveals What’s REALLY Going on Inside the Liberal Media
Fourteen hours after it went up, "David Brooks Reveals What's REALLY Going on Inside the Liberal Media" had passed 32,000 views. On this channel, a new episode usually closes its whole first day at around 4,500.
The subject is Brooks himself. He spent more than two decades as a conservative voice on the New York Times opinion page before moving to The Atlantic, and the video's description says he admitted two things: that bashing President Trump became a business model, and that journalists lost their distance from Democratic politicians. Emily Jashinsky, a Washington reporter and commentator who built her name on media criticism, takes his words as a starting point rather than a conclusion. She argues the problem runs deeper than bias against one man. In opposing Trump, she says, much of the press dropped its old suspicion of concentrated power and grew close to his opponents, and that, in her telling, is how trust in the media wore away.
The comment section had already outgrown a usual full first day. Much of it centers on one tension: viewers point out that Brooks spent years at the same tables he now describes, and many fasten on his claim that most journalists still did their jobs honestly. Others say the pattern he names is decades old.
The same day brought Jashinsky's takes on Zach Bryan's "Free Palestine" shirt and Mark Ruffalo's anti-Trump speech, plus a short clip of the Brooks segment. None came close to the full episode.
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- Subscribers
- 148,000 ▲ 1,000 this week
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 856,018
- Channel views, pace per day
- 111,139 (on a normal day: 86,464)
- Video published
- October 6, 2026
- Video views so far
- 32,199 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 43,012
The numbers
Here is how the Brooks episode's first hours compare with the channel's usual start.
💡 Test your knowledge
For years, David Brooks gave a regular Friday political analysis on which PBS program?
Brooks was a longtime Friday commentator on PBS NewsHour, paired for many years with Mark Shields.
