The Today Show

by Will Wilkinson on January 20, 2009

It’s really just too much to take. The American media lives for politics, and so what the American public gets is completely grotesque. Selected exchange:

Meredith Viera: I think the hardest thing is not getting emotional, because it’s such an emotional morning. You just want to laugh, you want to cry. It’s so moving. It hits you that you’ll probably never see anything like this again.

Peggy Noonan (I think): I keep thinking of the old poem, the end of the old poem about the end of the French Revolution: “Bliss was it then to be alive. To be young was very heaven.” So many young people here. It’s very moving for them.

Viera: I’m not young but I’m blissful, that’s for sure. 

It’s all like this. They can’t help themselves, apparently. But it’s also pretty clear that they really do see their job as mediating and engineering our emotional response, as manufacturing our consent.

  • Bill
    If the statement begins with "I keep thinking of..." and continues on to describe some obscure, sickly sweet or almost-funny anecdote or literary reference, you know it must be Noonan. Too bad that this snippet doesn't do justice to what a god-awful hack she is.
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