Editorial writers can have a solipsistic tendency to think journalism jobs are the most essential jobs imaginable. We can revere the philosophical argument about the importance of a free press in keeping democracy viable without thinking every lost job at a media outlet is the decline and fall of America.
The Washington Post just cut 300 jobs -- not from national politics but from foreign bureaus, and book reviews and sports. That means the Post no longer boasts the full menu of newspaper offerings. Journalists don't beat their breasts like this when coal miners or auto workers are laid off.
On Feb. 5, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan broke out in a crying jag of an editorial, sounding less like a conservative and more like a ranting lefty like Ellen Goodman or Mary McGrory in the Reagan-era Post.
"Reaction shouldn't break down along ideological lines," she protested, "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."
It's not a "disaster" that the Post doesn't have a Sports section. It's not a "disaster" if the Post has to shrink. Noonan wouldn't write a column like this if The Washington Times folded. She thinks it's not a real newspaper.
This is the first mistake liberals make: the conservatives find an enemy in "journalism" -- as if only liberal journalists are actual journalists. They do think journalism is their precinct, that conservative journalists are somehow not essential in holding government accountable or keeping democracy vibrant. Liberals don't want journalism that holds liberals and Democrats accountable. They seem to think democracy and Democratic Party dominance are the same thing. That's what "journalism" at The Washington Post reinforces.
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But Peggy keeps up the dramatic lament: "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." The politics-and-policy crew isn't going anywhere. The Post just looks more like Politico or Axios now.
We're told, "Government by its nature always wants to accumulate power and use it. A watchful press slows this process, sometimes stops it, by exposing its abuses. If citizens are informed, they can self-govern from a rough baseline of realism."
Noonan isn't working from a place of "realism." This whole article desperately clings to the Woodward-and-Bernstein-movie myth surrounding the Post. They destroyed Richard Nixon's presidency, which was apparently the summit of media greatness. It doesn't matter that you can't remember a time the Post undermined a Democrat president or Congress in that way. The heroism is in treating the conservatives as your "hulking enemy."
The conclusion is the most vomitous passage: that this reduction in liberal force under Trump is "more than a Jeffersonian nightmare, it is a kind of sin. The kind history doesn't easily forgive."
This is where you laugh at the writer claiming reaction to this unemployment news shouldn't "break down along ideological lines." Everything she's written about this is an ideological reaction, and that's especially true when you define a failure to muster your "Jeffersonian" resistance to Trump as an unforgivable "sin," as if Trump is Satan in the flesh.
The Washington Post will be thinner. Life will go on. Democracy will continue. America doesn't rise or fall with the fate of one Democrat-boosting newspaper. Take a pill, Peggy.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org.
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