Peggy Noonan, in this week’s regular post in the WSJ, wonders if readers really care about journalism. She thinks not, but then wonders and worries that 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.

Let’s backtrack a little before we plunge into the layoffs and the narrowing of coverage. Years of buyouts and shrinking coverage didn’t lead to a restructuring of the newspaper or the rearranging of priorities. Peggy Noonan thought of the Washington Post as a great newspaper – a thing of journalistic grandeur from some point in the 1960s through some point in the 2020s.

Did it wobble under pressure from the pandemic, George Floyd, and huge technological and journalistic changes? And not on the editorial side but on the news side? But Ms. Noonan kept her subscription, she writes, “because that is a way of trusting, of giving a great paper time to steady itself. (And there would always be an important David Ignatius column, or a great scoop on some governmental scandal that made it worth the cost.)”

The Post’s diminishment, which to Noonan looks like its demise, is not just a “media story.” Reactions are being drawn along ideological lines.

… the Left feels journalism is its precinct and is sad

… 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, notes Ms Noonan, appears to be without a vital, fully functioning newspaper to cover it. That isn’t the occasion for jokes; it’s a disaster.

Discussing why the demise of a newspaper is not good for Democracy, Peggy references Thomas Jefferson. “The good sense of the people,” Jefferson wrote, is always “the best army.” True, they can be “led astray,” but their mistakes will be limited and can be corrected through information that can “penetrate the whole mass of the people.” When the public is uninformed, those running government “shall all become wolves.”

Jefferson knew those who reported could produce work that was partisan, inaccurate, and sensationalistic. He himself became quite the mischievous manipulator of the press.

But again, the process could self-correct, especially if a nation had a big, burgeoning information culture, with everyone keeping an eye on everyone else.

What Is Jeff Bezos?

Nice man, business visionary. What is he now? Did the 4th-wealthiest man in the world dash his reputation to curry favor with the Trump administration? For what? More contracts?

He’s got enough contracts! It’s so small-time, so penny-ante. What matters is honor, that’s the thing that lasts, what history says of you, how you helped your country.

For those who execute diminishments, Peggy Noonan reminds them that “we are in the midst of a continuing technological revolution, the internet upended the business model, it’s hard out there.”

Peggy Noonan has been meeting with media executives for 20 years, and she feels there is something wrong.

Their only creativity is in describing everything that is killing their company, and they have vivid words for it – “strangling,” “pummeling.”

They have no words for coming alive and enduring. Might this be part of the problem?

Finally, writes Ms. Noonan, losing the one major newspaper in the great nation’s capital, “is more than a Jeffersonian nightmare, it is a kind of sin. The kind history doesn’t easily forgive.”