"An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff"
About this Quote
Stevenson’s line works because it flatters and skewers the press in the same breath, and it does so with a politician’s practiced smile: genial, quotable, and faintly lethal. The “wheat from the chaff” idiom pretends to honor editorial judgment - the noble idea that someone is sorting truth from noise. Then the punch lands: editors don’t merely fail; they select, discard, and still end up publishing what’s least nourishing. It’s not a claim that journalists are stupid. It’s a claim that the system rewards the wrong output.
The subtext is a tense midcentury dance between public officials and a rising professional media class. Stevenson, a cerebral liberal in the TV age, often found his nuance shaved down into scandal, gaffe, or horse-race narrative. This joke is his way of arguing that “responsible” gatekeeping can become a kind of laundering: messy reality is processed into something clean enough to print, which often means simplifying, sensationalizing, or choosing conflict over clarity. “Chaff” is not accidental; it suggests both waste and irritant - stuff that gets in your eyes and makes you cough.
There’s also a self-serving wink. A politician making fun of editors invites the audience to distrust the intermediary and give the speaker a more direct hearing. Stevenson doesn’t need to prove bias; he just needs to plant suspicion that the public is being fed fluff. The brilliance is its portability: every era can swap in clicks, cable panels, or algorithmic feeds and the barb still lands.
The subtext is a tense midcentury dance between public officials and a rising professional media class. Stevenson, a cerebral liberal in the TV age, often found his nuance shaved down into scandal, gaffe, or horse-race narrative. This joke is his way of arguing that “responsible” gatekeeping can become a kind of laundering: messy reality is processed into something clean enough to print, which often means simplifying, sensationalizing, or choosing conflict over clarity. “Chaff” is not accidental; it suggests both waste and irritant - stuff that gets in your eyes and makes you cough.
There’s also a self-serving wink. A politician making fun of editors invites the audience to distrust the intermediary and give the speaker a more direct hearing. Stevenson doesn’t need to prove bias; he just needs to plant suspicion that the public is being fed fluff. The brilliance is its portability: every era can swap in clicks, cable panels, or algorithmic feeds and the barb still lands.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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