Daily Inspiration Quote by Jim McKay

There is a quiet sleight of hand in McKay's phrasing: he starts in the mild key of curiosity ("would be interesting") and ends with a full-blown argument for fabrication as technique. The sentence performs what it proposes. It eases you from the documentary impulse ("stories that we had collected") into invention ("a fictitious story of our own") and then back into something that still borrows the sheen of authenticity by attaching those gathered stories to "characters" embodied by "actors". It is journalism flirting with drama, and it knows it.

The intent is pragmatic, not merely aesthetic. McKay is outlining a method to make messy, fragmentary realities legible to an audience that wants narrative: a beginning, a middle, a recognizable human arc. "Assigned them to characters" is the giveaway. The collected material is treated less as testimony with ownership and more as raw data that can be redistributed for coherence, pacing, and emotional payoff. That move can protect sources and compress time, but it also converts lived experience into a script, shifting authority from the people who spoke to the people who shape.

Context matters because McKay's era saw broadcast journalism increasingly compete with entertainment, where reenactments, composites, and narrative packaging promised access and intimacy. His language reflects that pressure: truth must not only be reported; it must be cast. The subtext is an ethical wager familiar today in true crime podcasts and prestige docudramas: viewers will feel something closer to the truth if the story is engineered, even if the facts are rearranged. The risk is that the audience remembers the performance as the record.