Noonan Elegizes A Paper That Once Was

I'd Like To Feel Sorry For The Washington Post, But...

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:

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.

You have to think of it as part of your country’s survival system. Maybe the government will or won’t tell you the truth about what’s going on, maybe the Pentagon will or won’t, but if you know you’ve got this fabulous island of broken toys, professional journalists working for a reputable news organization, you’ve got a real chance of learning what’s true.

It takes years to make good reporters—people who are trained, who love getting the story so much, who love the news so much, that they will wade into the fire, run to the sound of the guns. They are grown only in newsrooms, not at home with laptops. They are taught by older craftsmen and professionals, through stories and lore.

The Post’s greatness and expertise can’t easily be replaced and perhaps can’t be replaced at all, or at least not for decades of committed building.

She’s right about that — to a point. This really is a moment and an event that goes beyond left-vs-right. (Balaji Srinivasan even thinks that it symbolizes the end of the American Empire; I’m not at all sure that he’s wrong.)

Noonan is writing about journalism — or rather, Journalism — in an idealistic way. This is how I, who graduated from journalism school in 1989, was trained to think about the profession. It’s both noble and practical. I still believe that journalism is massively important, especially in a democracy. Where I dissent is in Noonan’s genuinely felt glorification of the Post.

For journalists of my generation, the Post was iconic. Watergate, mostly, but also because it was just a great paper. When I graduated, my motto was, “Style section by 30!” — meaning, my professional goal was to be hired by the Post’s terrific features section by the time I was thirty. I didn’t meet that goal, and the Style section, once the best of its kind, has been a shell of itself for many years. My point is, Noonan is eulogizing an institution and a profession that hasn’t existed for ages. I don’t say that mockingly; I too wish we still had that kind of journalism. But then, I wish we still had a lot of good things.

She blasts Jeff Bezos for not using his vast fortune to prop up a paper that fewer and fewer people read (this, by the Post’s own demographic research). I can sympathize with that; if I had Bezos Money, I wouldn’t mind losing a tiny bit of it each year to subsidize a money-losing enterprise that served the public good. But does the Post do that? Why has the paper lost so many readers over the years?

The Internet is no doubt the main reason. But it is surely also the fact that the Post served as the parish newsletter for the Church of Good Liberals. I sometimes joke that I subscribe to The New York Times so I can know what the regime’s official story is. (By “regime,” I don’t mean the Trump administration, heaven knows; I mean what Curtis Yarvin calls “the Cathedral” — the ruling class that makes up the Deep State and that runs most American institutions.) A Kremlinologist back in the Cold War would read Pravda for the same reason. But that’s unfair to the Times, which, for all its many, many faults, remains a great paper (though one severely limited by its own biases).

I entered journalism in its final golden years, before the Internet hit newspapers like an asteroid. The idea of seeking the truth and trying to be fair was still taken seriously in newsrooms. I imagine it still is, but only in the ideological terrarium in which journalists work.

What I saw over my years of working within the daily newspaper profession (1989-2010) was a degradation of professional standards and the rise of ideology. It’s a familiar story, one I needn’t go into here. To sum it up, I came to see newsrooms of people who all thought more or less the same way — liberal, progressive, secular — while telling themselves that they were the only truly open-minded people in town.

This surely has a lot to do with my own becoming religious, and more conservative, in the 1990s. That made me a definite outsider within newspapers. (Even when I worked for the New York Post, the fact that I was a religious and social conservative made me an outsider — but journalists at the NYP, to their eternal credit, never took themselves with as much self-regarding solemnity as the non-tabloid journalists I worked with.) As an outsider, I was able to see with the kind of clarity that only outsiders in any institution can, how blind so many of my colleagues (but not all!) were to their own biases.

What grated me, and the few other conservatives I got to know in newsrooms during those years), was the sense of crusading moralism within the profession, and the absolute confidence that they were Correct About Everything.

When I was at the Dallas Morning News, for example, I saw a lot of good reporting. But I also saw a deep conviction, assumed by most but never articulated, that any news that might in some way affirm the worldview of conservatives, especially religious conservatives, should not be reported.

An example: on the morning of the London subway bombings (July 7, 2005), I suggested in the morning news meeting, which took place just as the news was coming in from London, that the perpetrators probably will have been homegrown Islamists, and that in Dallas, there are some Islamic institutions that nurture radicalism. A liberal newsroom editor sitting on my right raised his voice to say why is it that we focus on Islamic radicalism when we have all these Christian Right lunatics running around. To his great credit, a liberal, gay colleague at the other end of the table said that was nonsense. In any case, our news pages did not write about the local radicals. I was able to do that on the editorial page, because I had an editor who bravely stood her ground when my enemies came after me, because I had the facts to back me up.

Or consider what happened to Donald McNeil, Jr., a health and medicine reporter with over four decades of experience at The New York Times. The Times fired him in 2021 after he used the n-word in a conversation with students, who had asked him about racial language. It was and remains batshit crazy to think McNeil was a racist because he uttered those two syllables in answer to a question about race from high school students on a trip. According to McNeil:

1. Yes, I did use the word, in this context: A student asked me if I thought her high school’s administration was right to suspend a classmate of hers for using the word in a video she’d made in eighth grade. I said “Did she actually call someone a “(offending word”? Or was she singing a rap song or quoting a book title or something?” When the student explained that it was the student, who was white and Jewish, sitting with a black friend and the two were jokingly insulting each other by calling each other offensive names for a black person and a Jew, I said “She was suspended for that? Two years later? No, I don’t think suspension was warranted. Somebody should have talked to her, but any school administrator should know that 12-year-olds say dumb things. It’s part of growing up.”

And, from a man who was a reporter based on South Africa for a time in his career (the American teenagers had accused him of defending blackface):

3. The question about blackface was part of a discussion of cultural appropriation. The students felt that it was never, ever appropriate for any white person to adopt anything from another culture — not clothes, not music, not anything. I counter-argued that all cultures grow by adopting from others. I gave examples — gunpowder and paper. I said I was a San Franciscan, and we invented blue jeans. Did that mean they — East Coast private school students — couldn’t wear blue jeans? I said we were in Peru, and the tomato came from Peru. Did that mean that Italians had to stop using tomatoes? That they had to stop eating pizza? Then one of the students said: “Does that mean that blackface is OK?” I said “No, not normally — but is it OK for black people to wear blackface?” “The student, sounding outraged, said “Black people don’t wear blackface!” I said “In South Africa, they absolutely do. The so-called colored people in Cape Town have a festival every year called the Coon Carnival* where they wear blackface, play Dixieland music and wear striped jackets. It started when a minstrel show came to South Africa in the early 1900’s. Americans who visit South Africa tell them they’re offended they shouldn’t do it, and they answer ‘Buzz off. This is our culture now. Don’t come here from America and tell us what to do.’ So what do you say to them? Is it up to you, a white American, to tell black South Africans what is and isn’t their culture?”

None of this mattered. The Times forced him to resign. Great Awokening stuff. So, when Peggy Noonan writes about the making of a journalist in this way — “They are taught by older craftsmen and professionals, through stories and lore” — I think of poor Donald McNeil.

Not all older journalists have had Donald McNeil’s experience. But Bari Weiss — a center-left opinion writer — left the Times around then because the progressive mob was running the newsroom. (Poor Bari; wonder whatever happened to her…). My point is that the model of newsrooms that Noonan idealizes really don’t exist anymore. The old-school liberal journalists like Donald McNeil know perfectly well that they are just one misstep away from being fired, no matter how much they know.

Long before the Great Awokening, when I was at the News, a black colleague went to our editor and accused me of “creating a hostile work environment” because I called a Pakistani mob that burned down a Danish consulate “savages.” I had been friends with that guy, and really liked him. He didn’t come to me — he went straight to the editor and used the kind of language that pricks up the ears of HR Karens. I removed the comment in which I said that from the editorial board blog, and told our editor I was doing it under protest. I told her that there is no way at this newspaper, given its HR department, that I could get a fair hearing in the case where a black man says a white conservative is “creating a hostile work environment” (by calling a fanatical Islamic mob burning down a consulate over a cartoon “savages”!).

I made it my business to stay as far away from that previously valued black colleague after that. He had my career in his hands, and he knew it. Many such cases.

Now, you tell me how this kind of environment relates to the Woodward & Bernstein nostalgia in Noonan’s column. Hey, I wish American newspapers were like she depicts them! She’s absolutely right about the importance of proper journalism to democracy. But I wish these same Post reporters and fellow travelers lamenting the Bezos savaging of their institution had thought about how they themselves were running the institution.

Uri Berliner, liberal and ex-NPR editor, wrote this well-read essay about how NPR lost America’s trust. In it, he said:

Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too.

These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.

They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).

All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth. If, as NPR’s internal website suggested, the groups were simply a “great way to meet like-minded colleagues” and “help new employees feel included,” it would have been one thing.

But the role and standing of affinity groups, including those outside NPR, were more than that. They became a priority for NPR’s union, SAG-AFTRA—an item in collective bargaining. The current contract, in a section on DEI, requires NPR management to “keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups” and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI Accountability Committee.

In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.

And:

In recent years I’ve struggled to answer that question. Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.

So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an all-hands editorial staff meeting. When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues. But the messages were of the “oh wow, that’s weird” variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star.

Berliner’s essay is about how all this affected NPR’s coverage of the issues. I would not be surprised if some wrongthinker inside the Washington Post could tell a similar story about how that paper changed over the years. I could be wrong! But I doubt I am.

Before the Internet, a lot of people subscribed to the paper because it was the only way to get in-depth news. Many liberal journalists flatter themselves that people won’t subscribe to the paper because they can’t handle the truth (I’ve heard this, multiple times). It never occurs to them to think that maybe the people don’t value the product, because they don’t trust it.

Me, I’m a conservative, but I want to be told true and important things about the world, even if they go against my own personal narrative. I wouldn’t value a conservative paper that was written to edit out the things that trouble conservatives. Just tell me as best you can about what’s going on in the real world, and I’ll figure it out. The problem with our papers today is they are written and edited by liberals and progressives, many (but not all) of whom have little concern about the world outside their own narrow confines.

I was told by a reader this week that one of the Norwegian journalists who interviewed me last weekend said that I shouldn’t have been invited to Norway at all, because I’m associated with J.D. Vance and Viktor Orban. That attitude is extreme, but I’ve seen a somewhat milder version of it among American liberal journalists. They just don’t see any reason to be curious about people unlike themselves, or fair.

Is any of this relevant to the fall of the Washington Post? I think so, though I hesitate to make any big, definitive pronouncement, given that I was a subscriber for a relatively short time, and just checked in with the paper from time to time. I have no doubt at all that somebody with my views — religious, conservative, mildly but skeptically Trumpy — could never get hired there, even though I’ve written two New York Times bestsellers. And if I did, I wouldn’t want to work there, because I wouldn’t want to have to deal with the kind of bullshit I sometimes dealt with at my last newspaper, in which right-thinking liberals would literally turn their backs to me if passing me in the hallway (this really happened once), or I would have to walk through a minefield waiting for a privileged minority to accuse me of making them anxious, and then having to go into a Kafkaesque HR process in which I would probably lose, being a white male conservative.

Noonan writes:

The Post’s greatness and expertise can’t easily be replaced and perhaps can’t be replaced at all, or at least not for decades of committed building.

I do not know the Washington Post, so I could be wrong here. But my guess is that the expertise that made the Post a great newspaper back in the day has been driven out of the paper by a progressive culture of militant hostility to anything that doesn’t fit the preferred Narrative, or at least self-satisfied incuriosity. As a young journalist, I dreamed of one day working at The Washington Post. I am certain there are good journalists still working there. But I would say something that wasn’t true in 1989, when I started working in daily newspapers: that they are places where curiosity about the world goes to die. You end up becoming less a reporter than a curator of Narrative. And God forbid you step outside the lines; the mob within the paper will make sure you are punished, maybe even ruined professionally.

I think about the greats of journalism past. Mencken. Liebling. Royko. So many others. Could they last five minutes among the Jacobins in newsrooms today? They were messy men, but if living teaches you anything, it’s that greatness and wisdom doesn’t always come in a neatly tied package. Good journalists are interesting journalists, and that means they are rarely saints. The fact that Donald McNeil’s 40+ years at the Times did not save him when some punk-ass teenagers accused him said a lot, not just about the Times, but about American journalism. Had he been a veteran of the Post, I doubt they would have handled that controversy any differently. Maybe I’m cynical, but I doubt any major American paper would have. These are the times in which we live.

Anyway, Noonan is right about one thing: losing good newspapers is a catastrophe for American democracy. But this is not Jeff Bezos’s fault. Look, if you spend time on X, and you follow the right accounts, you learn things that really happened in the world, and that really matter, that never make it into the pages or our respectable daily papers. Why don’t the people who report and edit the papers care about things like this?

Beats me. But fewer and fewer people care about them, so they end up in situations like the Post today, with some whining that Bezos ought to continue subsidizing them out of the goodness of his heart, even though their readership is declining, and talented public-minded people like Peggy Noonan writing elegies for a model of journalism that died a long time ago.