"Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed"
About this Quote
Hubbard’s joke lands because it flatters journalism’s self-image in the first clause, then knifes it in the second. “Separate the wheat from the chaff” evokes a civic priesthood: the editor as patient sorter of truth, virtue, and public value. Then Hubbard flips the job description into a deadpan indictment: the system doesn’t merely fail at discernment, it reliably elevates the worst material. The punchline isn’t that editors are incompetent; it’s that the machinery of news is structurally biased toward “chaff” because chaff is loud, cheap, and plentiful.
The subtext is a critique of incentives. Newspapers in Hubbard’s era were already learning that attention is revenue. Sensation, scandal, and simplification travel faster than nuance, and an editor’s “business” is just that: business. Hubbard’s wording makes the betrayal feel procedural, almost clerical, as if the editor’s true mandate is to launder fluff and outrage into legitimacy by putting it in print.
Context matters here. Hubbard, a writer-entrepreneur associated with the Roycroft movement, distrusted mass culture’s assembly-line thinking even as he profited from selling ideas. His barb reads like insider heresy: a literate craftsman watching an industrialized press turn public discourse into a commodity. It also anticipates a very modern cynicism: the fear that gatekeeping doesn’t protect us from noise; it professionalizes it. The line’s durability comes from its uncomfortable plausibility. Even people who respect editors recognize the perverse comfort of a newsroom that can always find space for what shouldn’t matter.
The subtext is a critique of incentives. Newspapers in Hubbard’s era were already learning that attention is revenue. Sensation, scandal, and simplification travel faster than nuance, and an editor’s “business” is just that: business. Hubbard’s wording makes the betrayal feel procedural, almost clerical, as if the editor’s true mandate is to launder fluff and outrage into legitimacy by putting it in print.
Context matters here. Hubbard, a writer-entrepreneur associated with the Roycroft movement, distrusted mass culture’s assembly-line thinking even as he profited from selling ideas. His barb reads like insider heresy: a literate craftsman watching an industrialized press turn public discourse into a commodity. It also anticipates a very modern cynicism: the fear that gatekeeping doesn’t protect us from noise; it professionalizes it. The line’s durability comes from its uncomfortable plausibility. Even people who respect editors recognize the perverse comfort of a newsroom that can always find space for what shouldn’t matter.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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