Meg Greenfield Quotes

What I mean is how public people almost eagerly dehumanize themselves. They allow the markings of region, family, class, individual character, and, generally, personhood that they once possessed to be leached away. At the same time, they construct a new public self that often does terrible damage to what remains of the genuine person.

We are professionally admonished to freeze many of our ordinary human instincts, to distance ourselves from too much personal knowledge of or contact with the people we write about, lest we endanger our objectivity or adulterate our product with an excess of understanding of their behavior or, God forbid, sympathy.

(As the journalist Meg Greenfield once observed, Washington isn’t filled with the wild kids who stuck the cat in the dryer; it’s filled with the kind of kids who tattled on the kids who stuck the cat in the dryer.)

Each spring we go to big banquets, press and politicians all done up in formal dress, where everyone applauds the awarding of prizes to journalists who have exposed the crumminess of the political leaders sitting at the head table, joining in the ovation and fun. Lots of jokes are made. Lots of hands are shaken. It is a community affair.

Image was fluff and fabricated. Reputation was solid and earned.

She was clearly an intellectual, but a far from purely academic one.