Time & Perspective Quote by Bob Schieffer

Schieffer lets you peek behind the curtain of a profession that trades in public urgency but runs, internally, on private mythology. The premise sounds modest: a scrapbook of assignments, a greatest-hits reel of events covered. Then he pivots to the real engine of the project: reporters don’t just report stories, they narrate themselves. They “spend a lot of time telling each other tales” about coverage, and that word choice matters. Tales aren’t transcripts; they’re shaped, selective, performative. Journalism, in this telling, is as much a culture of war stories as it is a method for verifying facts.

The intent is partly explanatory (here’s what I saw) and partly social (here’s how we talk when the cameras are off). Schieffer frames the book’s origin in newsroom ritual: recounting how you got the quote, how you made the flight, how you navigated the gatekeepers. The subtext is that the process becomes its own commodity, a second narrative that confers status among peers and reassures the storyteller that their proximity to history means something. It’s also a quiet admission of mediation: what audiences receive as clean “coverage” begins as messy human logistics, judgment calls, and luck.

Contextually, Schieffer belongs to an era when broadcast journalists were public fixtures and institutions still carried authority. By emphasizing the craft lore of reporting, he’s defending the profession’s value at a moment when credibility is contested: not by claiming neutrality, but by showing the human labor - and the storytelling impulse - that sits beneath the headline.