"And it was at that point that I realized, in fact, our whole administration realized, that we could not rely on Metropolitan Edison for the kind of information we needed to make decisions"
About this Quote
There is a particular chill in the moment a government admits it has to stop trusting the very entity built to run the system. Scranton’s line, delivered in the shadow of the Three Mile Island crisis, isn’t just a complaint about a utility’s bad briefing habits. It’s a public demotion: Metropolitan Edison is quietly stripped of its presumed competence and recast as a liability.
The intent is administrative triage. In an emergency, information is oxygen, and Scranton is signaling that the state has discovered a suffocation point. The sentence is built to sound procedural, almost bland, but that restraint is strategic. He uses “realized” twice - first personally, then institutionally - to transform a potentially panicked loss of control into a measured consensus. “Our whole administration realized” functions like a seal of legitimacy: this isn’t Scranton freelancing, it’s the machinery of government shifting gears.
Subtext: the public-private bargain has failed at the exact moment it matters most. A nuclear incident turns corporate opacity from an annoyance into a threat. Scranton doesn’t accuse Met Ed of deception outright; he frames it as unreliability, a word that covers incompetence, confusion, and self-protection without inviting a libelous brawl mid-crisis. The phrase “the kind of information we needed to make decisions” is also a quiet admission that the state’s decision-making capacity had been outsourced. His line marks the pivot back to governmental authority - not in triumph, but in reluctant necessity.
The intent is administrative triage. In an emergency, information is oxygen, and Scranton is signaling that the state has discovered a suffocation point. The sentence is built to sound procedural, almost bland, but that restraint is strategic. He uses “realized” twice - first personally, then institutionally - to transform a potentially panicked loss of control into a measured consensus. “Our whole administration realized” functions like a seal of legitimacy: this isn’t Scranton freelancing, it’s the machinery of government shifting gears.
Subtext: the public-private bargain has failed at the exact moment it matters most. A nuclear incident turns corporate opacity from an annoyance into a threat. Scranton doesn’t accuse Met Ed of deception outright; he frames it as unreliability, a word that covers incompetence, confusion, and self-protection without inviting a libelous brawl mid-crisis. The phrase “the kind of information we needed to make decisions” is also a quiet admission that the state’s decision-making capacity had been outsourced. His line marks the pivot back to governmental authority - not in triumph, but in reluctant necessity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
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