Restoring the Sacred

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Peggy Noonan: The Antithesis of Honesty in Reporting


Former White House speechwriter Peggy Noonan, writing in today's Wall Street Journal,
clearly and succinctly manifested the problem that gave us the misremembering Brian Williams.

After introducing her essay with a brief encomium to former CBS foreign correspondent Bob Simon, she gives us Brian Williams as the perfect counterpoint.  Enough has already been said about Williams (and his omnipresent penchant for personal aggrandizement) in the mass media, so Noonan uses the words of an 84 year old longtime reader of her column to make her point.

Here's the quote:
A longtime reader of this column, age 84, emailed recently to say the heartbreak of his life the past few years has been witnessing the daily corruption of all information—the rigging of numbers and claiming of facts, the scientific papers that manipulate data to advance a political agenda, the misleading government statistics. We’re drowning in lies, he said. 
Noonan adds:
       That is not an exaggeration.