Unfortunately, Peggy Noonan’s Idealized Journalism Doesn’t Exist

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, February 09, 2026

 

Last week, in the course of what she described as “a lament,” Peggy Noonan wrote the following about the firings at the Washington Post:

 

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.

 

I love Peggy Noonan. I love her writing. I love the speeches she wrote for Ronald Reagan and others. I met her once — she won’t remember! — and she was lovely in person, too. But I’m going to have to disagree with her on this one. “Something bad” has already happened. Lots of something bads, in fact. In the last decade alone, we have had the Brett Kavanaugh witch hunt, Russiagate, Covid, the insanity of the summer of George Floyd, and the coverup of President Biden’s senility, and in each of those cases, the media — including the Washington Post  — have disgraced themselves.

 

Noonan gestures at this early on, writing:

 

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.

 

This, precisely, is where I dissent. The press — and the Post specifically — did not “wobble” during Covid or George Floyd. It proved itself completely unfit for purpose. It did not provide “reliable information”; it became an organ of propaganda. It did not check the hysterics among us; it amplified them. It did not question the transient judgments of the establishment; it set them on a pedestal and declared them to be synonymous with Science and Democracy. If journalism is “getting the information,” then, during those crucial episodes at least, the Washington Post was not journalism.

 

Later, Noonan waxes lyrical about the press in general:

 

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.

 

That sounds nice in theory. But, in practice, I don’t think of the press as a particularly useful part of my country’s “survival system,” I don’t think that most journalists can be described as “professional,” I don’t consider that most news organizations can be characterized as “reputable,” and I don’t believe that, when I open the newspapers, I have “a real chance of learning what’s true.” I, too, love the idea of such an indispensable institution, much as I, too, love the idea of the open-minded university or the idea of the sincere union boss. Trouble is, they rarely exist in the modern world. As is true of academia and labor unions, journalism these days is mostly a front for progressivism and its preferred political vehicle, the Democratic Party, and most journalists are impressionable, excitable, venal, partisan types who are susceptible to the worst forms of groupthink and conformity. I would genuinely love it if journalism were not like that, and if, instead, it were to play the role that Peggy Noonan earnestly believes it should. But it doesn’t, and it hasn’t, and until that changes I will remain deaf to the encomia and the cheers.