Politics & Power Quote by Bob Schieffer

Schieffer’s line is the kind of calm, grandfatherly confidence that doubles as a dare. On its face, it’s a toast to the Information Age: unprecedented access, coupled with a reassuring belief that “the American people” can separate signal from noise. The phrasing matters. “For sure” and “pretty good” are softeners, the verbal equivalents of a hand on the shoulder. He isn’t thundering about democracy; he’s normalizing it, implying competence is the baseline.

That’s also the subtextual sleight of hand. By asserting we sort things out “pretty good,” Schieffer quietly defends the old civic story that an informed public self-corrects. Coming from a legacy broadcast journalist - a cohort trained to be the country’s nightly filter - the line reads like both pride and self-justification: yes, the gatekeepers are less gate-y now, but trust the audience, and by extension trust the ecosystem that produced him.

Context sharpens the irony. Americans do have more information, but access isn’t literacy, and quantity isn’t clarity. The most powerful actors in modern media aren’t editors; they’re recommendation engines, outrage incentives, and partisan entrepreneurs. Schieffer’s optimism works rhetorically because it’s comforting and patriotic without being jingoistic. It flatters the listener into identifying as reasonable.

The tension is the point: the sentence functions as a vote of confidence and a preemptive rebuttal to panic about misinformation. It’s less a measurement of reality than an attempt to hold a shared standard in place.