NYT Columnist Frank Bruni Takes on Government, Media, in Chapel Talk

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni criticized the “narrowly customized information cocoons” of today’s media for contributing to the current Congressional impasse during a Chapel Talk at Groton School Monday morning.

He called the current government shutdown “the latest manifestation of how sclerotic and dysfunctional the United States Congress has become” and took on Americans, notably political leaders, who reinforce their own beliefs by accessing only likeminded media, a practice he said impedes compromise and fed the stalemate behind the government shutdown.

These narrow “cocoons”—Fox TV for conservatives, MSNBC for liberals, for example—“…[push] them toward conflict and combat, not cooperation, and it’s reflected right now in the particularly egregious, strident, unyielding behavior of a band of Republicans in the House of Representatives who think that their minority view should hold majority sway.

“Why do they think that?” Mr. Bruni continued. “Because all they ever look at, and all they ever hear, is the selective applause inside their customized cocoons.”

He exhorted Groton students “not to construct and dwell in one of these cocoons. The very purpose and mandate of education are to confront new ideas and consider different perspectives. To challenge yourself. To stretch. So please, please do that, and not just with the information you take in but with the adventures you take on."

Mr. Bruni went on to describe his own adventures, from a grueling Outward Bound program—which he tried to quit but later recognized as a great source of accomplishment and confidence—and reporting assignments with troops in Iraq to covering a presidential election and spending several years as the Times’ restaurant critic.

Early in his talk, he described a sort of ephiphany while in Shanghai, when he opened his iPad, preparing to watch an American television show, but suddenly realized, “Here I was in this exotic city I’d never visited before, this exotic country I’d never visited before, and what I was tempted to do—and was sometimes doing—was staring at a device that had followed me from home and that contained the same videos and movies I would have watched there, the same novels that I might have read, the same magazines I always turned to. I was choosing the comfort of the utterly familiar over the challenge and the enlightenment of the strange and new. I’d flown 13 hours only to shrink my world instead of expanding it.”

Mr. Bruni expanded the worlds of Groton students throughout the day, meeting with several English classes, where he offered guidance on good writing. Some writers work better in the moment, when they are “worked up” about a topic or event, while other writing projects “need to steep,” he said. “Know yourself. Don’t hold yourself to someone else’s standard.”

Many who struggle with writing are good storytellers, intuitively knowing how to structure their stories verbally, inserting colorful details and holding climactic moments until the story’s end. “Write the way you talk,” he advised those who freeze when they sit down to write. “If you can lose your fear and lose your sense of formality, it’s often a great way to get going.”

To write well, he stressed, one must read voraciously. “Reading for writing is like training is for a big race,” he said. “If you want to be a good writer, you should read a lot.”

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