Peggy Noonan wrote a column titled The Purpose of Journalism Is to Get the Story (27 June 2024).
« The purpose of journalism is to get the story and tell the story. »
« And the great thing for newspapers is if you get the story—if you are known to get the story, like the Washington Post in the Watergate years—you will be read.
Because you will be needed. And if you are needed people will pay for you. »
« If you are just following along with some agenda, you will be read by those who share that agenda, but no one else. And readership will plummet. »
« The past two decades, accelerating over the past four years, newsrooms have increasingly become distracted from their main mission, confused about their purpose. Really, they’ve grown detached from their mission. »
« In early 2023, Len Downie and Andrew Heyward, formerly executive editor of the Washington Post and president of CBS News, respectively, wrote a paper about how modern journalists see standards within their professions, and it seemed to me not only confused but a kind of capitulation. There had been a “generational shift” in journalism, and the many editors and reporters they interviewed think objectivity is more or less “outmoded,” a false standard created by the white male patriarchy. What was really striking was there was no mention, not one, of the thrill of the chase, of getting the story—of journalism itself. It… made them look like news bureaucrats, joyless grinds, self-infatuated bores.
If that is who they are, who needs them? Who would pay hundred of dollars a year to read them? »
« More disturbing, major stories go unreported because, the reader senses, they don’t relate to the personal obsessions of the editors and reporters, or to their political priors. Didn’t I say that politely? There’s a sense newsrooms are distracted by HR issues »
« It is good and worthy and necessary to have reporters and editors who come from different experiences, different classes, different cultural assumptions. But current ways of encouraging diversity seem to yield a great sameness in terms of class and viewpoint, and in any case diversity is a mission within a mission, it isn’t the mission itself, which is: Get the story, tell the story. »
Selected books by Peggy Noonan:
The Time of Our Lives: Collected Writings (2015)
Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now (2008)
John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father (2005)
What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era (2003)
When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan (2001)
On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity (1999)
Articles of Interest 