Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Jennings

Negative campaigning gets framed as a moral failing, but Peter Jennings treats it like weather: everyone complains, nobody abolishes it. That move is pure newsroom realism. By shifting the debate to “the eye of the beholder,” he’s not excusing attack ads so much as puncturing the fantasy that there’s a clean, objective line between “contrast” and “smear.” In practice, the same message lands as “hard truths” to one voter and “unfair shots” to another, depending on identity, partisan priors, and trust in the messenger. Jennings is naming perception as the real battleground.

The subtext is also a quiet rebuke to reformist nostalgia. Americans periodically demand a politics purified of ugliness, as if incentives can be scolded away. Jennings, shaped by decades watching campaigns and the media’s role in amplifying conflict, implies something colder: negativity isn’t a glitch in democracy; it’s a feature of competitive power. Attacks work because they simplify, they stick, and they provide a narrative spine reporters can cover. Even “calling out” negativity becomes content that keeps it circulating.

Context matters: Jennings spent his career as a trusted television anchor in an era when broadcast news still claimed a kind of national referee status. That authority made him a frequent target of accusations about bias and “gotcha” framing. So his line doubles as self-defense: if everyone sees negativity differently, the press will always be accused of enabling it, even when it’s just documenting what campaigns do. The bleak punch is that the public’s appetite and the system’s incentives are aligned, which is why the practice survives every round of hand-wringing.