How can we best understand the Scott Thomas mess? Why did the editors at The New Republic not realize that the “Baghdad Diaries” of Scott Thomas Beauchamp didn’t pass the smell test?
It’s because they only “saw it in a movie,” writes Peggy Noonan. You remember, the great anti-war movies of “Kubrick and Coppola and Oliver Stone.”
Shall we say that those movies were a little too focused on sending a message?
What we are seeing here is the naivete of the modern media. Says Noonan:
It has to do with what sometimes seems to me to be the limited lives that have been or are being lived by the rising generation of American professionals in the arts, journalism, academia and business.
Noonan was lucky, she realizes. She came up through CBS News—she used to write Dan Rather’s radio commentaries—and in those days the network was still under “the influence of the Murrow boys.” Those guys had lived a little, and they had a nose for “a bunch of hooey.”
But our modern media boys and girls do not.
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