Peggy Noonan Still Thinks the Media Tells the Truth

I am old enough to remember when Peggy Noonan was worth reading. 

She is smart and charming, with a real way with words. She has the soul of a poet and the common sense one expects from one. 

I consider ⁦⁦@Peggynoonannyc⁩ one of our great columnists, but I can’t decide whether her naïveté about mainstream journalism is wistfully touching or just sad. The journalism she defends no longer exists, outside a few small town newspapers. https://t.co/CtYfcdNmhO

— Gary Abernathy (@AbernathyGary) February 7, 2026

Noonan became a national figure as an exceptional speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, best known for penning his speech given after the Challenger accident. Unfortunately, the fact that we all knew it was she who wrote it was mainly due to Noonan’s desire to be known as the woman who wrote that speech, which reflected poorly on her. 

Noonan became, at least among the intellectuals, something of a celebrity. And, unfortunately, she appears to have reveled in that fact. 

It’s hard to blame her. Her celebrity and her talent have served her well. But her continued celebrity among intellectuals has come at a price: her ability to think critically. In exchange for her success, she has given her fealty to an establishment that, among other things, was vicious and unfair to her mentor Reagan and to all Republicans. 

Having lived through Covid, BLM, and the coverup of Joe Biden’s senility, I’m going to have to disagree with Peggy Noonan about this one. https://t.co/FOSViqSNVx

— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) February 8, 2026

In the war between the elite and the hoi polloi, Noonan switched sides. 

Nothing betrays this fact more than her lament for the decline of the Washington Post. 

But the Post’s diminishment, which looks like its demise, isn’t just a “media story.” Reaction shouldn’t break down along ideological lines, 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.

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.

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.

It takes years to make good reporters—people who are trained, who love getting the story so much, who love the news so much, that they will wade into the fire, run to the sound of the guns. They are grown only in newsrooms, not at home with laptops. They are taught by older craftsmen and professionals, through stories and lore.

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.

I have a certain level of sympathy for her longing for a press that reports without fear or favor, although, unlike Noonan, I am not naive enough to believe that we have seen such a thing in either her or my lifetime. Perhaps never, to be honest, although there was a moment in history when that was what journalists aspired to. 

I was a fourth-generation newspaper journalist. My first job was taking local election totals off a chalkboard at the courthouse and relaying them to the local newsroom. I delivered the AJC at 4 am every day of my freshman year of college. I’m sad we don’t have local Metro…

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) February 6, 2026

Noonan certainly saw how biased the media was against Ronald Reagan, her boss, and how tolerant they were of the Clintons, for whom she had the capacity for contempt. She has every reason to understand how corrupt the media is, but can’t make the leap to grasping the import: the media is not dying because Donald Trump and MAGA killed it or that the economic model changed, but because it killed itself. Lamenting the imminent death of The Washington Post, should it actually die, is as rational as lamenting the death of the old Soviet version of Pravda. 

Up until the Bush II years, the media was biased; sometime during the Obama years it became a hoax generating machine. The Washington Post shared a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Russian Collusion Hoax, for God’s sake. On every major issue the “news” lies to us. 

As most of Noonan’s critics point out, apparently, she didn’t live through the past decade. Journalists have been as interested in conveying facts and the truth as Bernie Madoff was in honest financial management. 

I don’t count Noonan among the hoaxers; I count her among the naive who cling to an illusion that the people who control our government and culture are decent and concerned for the nation. And as one of those naive people, she is helping the hoaxers, cheering them on as they erode our freedoms. 

I share Noonan’s nostalgia for a more innocent time, but I am not nostalgic at all for my lost innocence. The cultural elite, of whom the journalistic class is a key member, are promoting evil. 

As Ronald Reagan said, 

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

He said that long before Noonan (or anybody else) wrote his speeches, and he was reminding us that the struggle to preserve freedom is constant, and that freedom’s enemies are not always external. 

Pravda is freedom’s enemy, and Noonan should know that. 

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