Time & Perspective Quote by Joe Sacco

Sacco is gently dismantling the myth of the journalist as a laser-focused truth machine, parachuting in, extracting “the story,” and leaving with a clean narrative arc. His point is messier: the longer you stay, the more the assigned storyline starts to look like a convenience, not a natural boundary. That’s a provocation aimed as much at editors and news cycles as at reporters. The “primary story” is usually a commissioning decision - a frame imposed by budgets, attention spans, and geopolitics. Time on the ground exposes how arbitrary that frame can be.

The intent isn’t just to romanticize immersion; it’s to argue for ethical proximity. “You meet so many interesting people” is a quiet rebuke to coverage that reduces communities to symbols: victim, militant, refugee, hero. Sacco’s work in comics journalism has always made room for peripheral lives, the conversations that don’t fit the headline but explain why the headline exists. He’s signaling that context isn’t a background layer; it’s the actual substance, and the official “story” is often the thinnest slice of it.

There’s subtext about power, too. When you accumulate “experiences,” you also accumulate obligations: people trust you, correct you, complicate you. The longer you listen, the harder it becomes to flatten events into a single moral or political takeaway. In an industry built on speed and spectacle, Sacco is making a case for the slow-burn narrative as a form of accuracy.