I’m not a person who nurses a lot of peeves.
I’m pretty much live and let live; I have my foibles, you can have your peccadillos.
But if there’s a trait among journalists that annoys the piddle out of me, it’s their tendency to imbue journalism with the attributes of a holy calling, and its institutions with a significance that was absurd even back when “journalism” ostensibly meant something.
But there’s never been anything quite like this.
Ruth Marcus writes in RCP, with emphasis added:
Don Graham’s decision to sell The Washington Post was his reverse Sophie’s Choice moment.
She had to decide which cherished child to save and which to send to the gas chamber. Don and the Graham family weren’t forced to make an anguishing choice but did so anyway. They relinquished the newspaper they love in order to protect it.
If the comparison sounds hyperbolic, you don’t know the Grahams.
And Ruth Marcus is as tone-deaf as Ryan Winkler.
If it were any other business – including yours – it’d be just the daily thrum of business happening to theWaPo.
Do newspapers have any greater significance to society, especially the parts of society that don’t work for the newspapers?
If that was ever the case, it was long before the Big Media whored itself out to the Big Left. To the extent that newspapers ever played a role in civil society, it was when they still saw themselves as a check and balance on government. Rather than just conservative government.
Good riddance. Hope Bezos shuts it down.
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