What happened to honesty?

New York

My friend Tom Fleming, editor-in-chief of Chronicles, and a polymath who doesn’t tolerate fools or knaves, recently wrote that when he’s described as a journalist, he takes it as an insult. ‘Journalists are to writers what kept women are to wives …’ The American version of Paul Johnson went on to say that even the old standards of mercenary journalism have collapsed. ‘Most journalists no longer even pretend to follow the news. All that matters to them is their celebrity status on TV.’ Egotism, rudeness, ignorance and total dishonesty make for a depressing spectacle, and nothing depresses more than today’s television, on both sides of the ocean. Then there’s politics, as practiced by today’s politicians. ‘He never told the truth when a lie would serve,’ was the great Douglas MacArthur’s judgment on FDR, and the same can now be applied to virtually the entire world of politics and journalism.