A Shining Candle in the Wind

In the manner of Roger Ailes (not the bald repulsive one), we offer a little puzzle: Of which event, concerning the death of a major global figure, is this Wall Street Journal online editorial page article writing?

vulgarity and gaudy grief...The obscene hyperventilation that followed X's death, the breast-beating, the bawling, the wailing, the flailing...the martyr worship, the rampant mythology, the ululation...grieving for X as if X were a saint, a sage, an angel...

Every two-bit hack became a hagiographer; every chain-smoking, beer-swilling, quote-piping reporter became the builder of a monument of grief...Sonorous editorials were written--by men and women who should have known better--and headlines of the most excruciating unctuousness were confected by normally hard-bitten copywriters...

[I] gathered a bushel of inane quotes from sniffling teenagers and yentas. Never have I hated my job more, or had more contempt for the journalist's milieu. I was only obeying orders; but we've heard that line before, and have learned to treat it with scorn...My editors had become praise-singers. I had a bit part in this process of X's deification, but a part all the same. The memory makes me feel ill.

UPDATE: Yes, Princess Diana and not Ronald Reagan, a tirade from Dorothy Rabinowitz's Media Log column, though actually penned by fellow spite-meister Tunku Varadarajan.
We welcome guesses for these additional questions: (1) When will Dorothy Rabinowitz offer a similarly contemptuous account of some of the more mawkish aspects of the Reagan memorials, and (2) will such an article come sooner than an OpinionJournal retraction of their gloating over the State Department Global Terrorism report for 2003, which showed a reduction in global terrorism -- given that the numbers have now themselves been retracted? Their gloating included the following:

We're Winning
....
But isn't it more newsworthy that the State Department numbers suggest the Times' cliché [of rising terrorism in the Arab world] is false?

DUDES! Sometimes a cliche is a cliche because it's TRUE!