There’s the power of the press for you.

Consider, for instance, this episode fromScoop, Evelyn Waugh’s classic satire on the occasionalwaywardness of journalism’s most celebrated and romanticizedcorps d’elite, the foreign correspondents.

I was recently reminded of a story about Evelyn Waugh, who had behaved particularly rudely to a young French intellectual at a dinner party. Waugh was asked by the host, Nancy Mitford, how he could act so meanly and yet consider himself a believing and practicing Catholic. “You have no idea,” Waugh is said to have responded, “how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic.”