Scoop Profiled in Arkansas Paper

Philip Martin has written an opinion column on Scoop which appears in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s online edition. Excluded from his wife’s book group’s discussion of the novel, he took the occasion to reconsider it (and Waugh in Abyssinia) in his column. After summarizing the historical background and Waugh’s story (both the fictional and factual versions), he concludes with this:

… Waugh’s purpose is not to point out that reporters can be craven, opportunistic and careerist, though all that is certainly true. The real point of Scoop is that it’s difficult if not impossible to determine the real truth about anything. Waugh was deeply Catholic, distrustful of rationalism. Scoop isn’t an assault on the laziness of journalists, it’s a book about how arrogant human beings are when they pretend to know anything.

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