The Instances Is Including Disclosures About David Brooks’s Outdoors Work to His Columns

The New York Times said Saturday that it read previous articles by opinion columnist David Brooks discussing the Weave Project he founded, a community building program he founded, and the project’s donors, including the social media company Facebook, were mentioned.

The Times also said that Mr. Brooks had resigned from a paid position at the Aspen Institute, a think tank where the Weave Project is one of dozen of programs and initiatives. Mr. Brooks will continue to be involved in the Weave project on a voluntary basis and will have to disclose the relationship in case he should write about the project in the future.

The move came after reports in BuzzFeed News of Facebook’s donation, which raised questions about whether Mr. Brooks should have informed readers about his nature of his involvement in the Weave Project.

According to Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, Mr. Brooks had received approval to take the paid position at Aspen in 2018, but the current editors of the opinion department were unaware of the agreement. Upon learning of this, Ms. Murphy said that they “have come to the conclusion that holding a paid position” for the Weave Project “poses a conflict of interest for David when writing about the work of the project, its donors, or the speak of broader subjects on which it is focused.

“David understands these concerns and has resigned from the Aspen Institute,” she added.

On Saturday afternoon, several columns by Mr. Brooks contained an editorial notice stating that he had been and resigned as “a paid employee” at the Aspen Institute in connection with the web project.

In June last year, James Bennet, then the opinion editor, left the paper after an internal outcry over a polarizing op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton who was calling for a military response to civil unrest. That year, Kathleen Kingsbury was appointed editor of the Times’ Opinion Section, which is separate from the newsroom.

On Wednesday, BuzzFeed reported that Mr. Brooks of the Aspen Institute had received a salary for his work on the Weave Project that he failed to disclose in several columns he wrote about Weave, and that Facebook made a donation of 250,000 in December 2018 USD had earmarked Aspen for the web project to conduct research. BuzzFeed News also reported last month that Mr. Brooks gave qualified praise for Facebook’s “Groups” feature in a post on Facebook’s corporate website.

Mr. Brooks was not involved in the day-to-day management of the Weave Project last year as the project hired a new director and Mr. Brooks took over the chairmanship, according to a statement from the Aspen Institute. Mr. Brooks, who joined The Times in 2003, founded the Weave Project in 2018.

Ms. Murphy, the Times spokeswoman, said Mr. Brooks was not paid by Facebook and “was not involved in raising funds from Facebook for Aspen or Weave.”

Mr. Brooks did not respond to a request for comment. During a regular Friday night appearance on PBS NewsHour, he defended himself and said the situation “has not affected my journalism.” Mr. Brooks added that “everything is public”. However, according to BuzzFeed, Aspen hadn’t disclosed some of the Weave Project’s donors, including Facebook, until BuzzFeed reporters asked about them this year.

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