Peggy Noonan: A Lament for the Washington Post

[Nevilledog]

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/a-lament-for-the-washington-post-a5509d63

No paywall link
https://archive.li/WMkX4

The diminishment of the Washington Post hits hard because it feels like another demoralizing thing in our national life. Our public life as a nation—how we are together, how we talk to each other, the sound of us—isn’t what it was. It’s gone down and we all feel this, all the grown-ups.

The Post was a pillar. The sweeping layoffs and narrowing of coverage announced this week followed years of buyouts and shrinking sections. None of this feels like the restructuring of a paper or a rearranging of priorities, but like the doing-in of a paper, a great one, a thing of journalistic grandeur from some point in the 1960s through some point in the 2020s. I feel it damaged itself when, under the pressure of the pandemic, George Floyd and huge technological and journalistic changes, it wobbled—and not in the opinion section but on the news side. But I kept my subscription because that is a way of trusting, of giving a great paper time to steady itself. (And there would always be an important David Ignatius column, or a great scoop on some governmental scandal that made it worth the cost.)

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.

*snip*

[harumph]

1. Says Peggy Noonan, another water carrier for the right wing

that got us to this point in the first place. You asked for it - you got it - fas-ci-sm! (Sung to the tune of the old Toyota jingle).

[BeyondGeography]

2. She describes herself as one of the grown-ups in the first paragraph

What I remember about her among other things was she spent Barack Obama’s entire presidency stamping her feet in objection. And if she said a single critical word about the mindless partisanship of her beloved Republican Party toward Obama’s frequent attempts to work with them I missed it.

[yorkster]

4. I can't stand her. Even her words "the sound

of us" give me the old Noonan cringe.
But I am glad she wrote this.article.

[pandr32]

3. We are going through a change.

Those pillars of journalism are controlled by money--not purpose. We can no longer trust our morning paper or our official media channels.
Yet, information is getting out to the People. We are networking in other ways.

[RandySF]

5. Republicans hated the Post for decades.

[Ritabert]

6. Hey Peggy you were an enabler of this attitude for years

Cheerleader for Reagan whose regime started it all.

[betsuni]

7. "We all feel this, all the grown-ups" *gazes at the wintry city from her penthouse, takes pensive sip of large martini*

Gone with the wind, she thinks, gone with the wind, emptying the martini glass.

I wonder what the "wobbling" was that she didn't care for. Must have been too vulgar for the grown-ups.

[gulliver]

8. Whales don't work in this info ecology

WaPo has been a great paper. I just don't think it works at scale now. All the talented people who work there are going to want to be influencers on YouTube, X, and substack.

A gig at WaPo doesn't get you the prestige and clout it once did. Everybody has heard of CBS, so they may be able to shed the deadwood and become a force. CBS still has broadcast reach, for one thing. Very few people know about WaPo being important.