- Feb 5, 2002
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I have unlocked for you Peggy Noonan’s funeral oration for the Washington Post, published in the Wall Street Journal. Lots of people talking about it now, and for good reason. It is Noonan at her rhetorical finest, but also reads like something that can only have been written by someone from the ancien régime. She’s right about most things here, in my view, but also idealistic in a way that just seems antique. Let me explain.
Noonan says the decline, perhaps fatal, of the Post under owner Jeff Bezos, who just laid off 300 people there, is a catastrophe. She writes:
Continued below.
roddreher.substack.com
Noonan says the decline, perhaps fatal, of the Post under owner Jeff Bezos, who just laid off 300 people there, is a catastrophe. She writes:
But the Post’s diminishment, which looks like its demise, isn’t just a “media story.” Reaction shouldn’t break down along ideological lines, in which the left feels journalism is its precinct and is sad, and the right feels journalism is its hulking enemy and isn’t sad. Treat it that way and we’ll fail to see the story for its true significance. The capital of the most powerful nation on earth appears to be without a vital, fully functioning newspaper to cover it. That isn’t the occasion of jokes, it’s a disaster.
I fear sometimes that few people really care about journalism, but we are dead without it. Someday something bad will happen, something terrible on a national scale, and the thing we’ll need most, literally to survive, is information. Reliable information—a way to get it, and then to get it to the public. That is what journalism is, getting the information.
Continued below.
Noonan Elegizes A Paper That Once Was
I'd Like To Feel Sorry For The Washington Post, But...