"I want to try to talk like normal people talk, not just stand there and bark at the camera"
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A veteran of the Sunday-show pulpit admitting he doesnt want to bark is Schieffer quietly indicting the whole performance. "Bark at the camera" conjures the bad habit of political TV: a studio built to manufacture certainty, where hosts and guests deliver prepackaged outrage in clipped, commanding bursts. Barking is what you do at an intruder, not what you do with a fellow citizen. By choosing that verb, Schieffer frames cable-era punditry as animal reflex: loudness as authority, repetition as dominance.
The stated intent is modest - speak "like normal people" - but the subtext is radical for broadcast news. It signals a desire to deprogram the genre from its default settings: confrontation over curiosity, gotcha over listening, the host as traffic cop corralling sound bites. Schieffer's career straddles a major shift in American media, from the old high-trust anchor model to the fragmented attention economy where being calm can read as being weak. His line is less nostalgia than strategy: if journalism wants credibility, it has to sound human again.
The phrase also smuggles in a moral position. "Normal people" is a rebuke to the insider dialect of Washington and the theatrical cadence of television. It's an argument that democracy is damaged when public talk is optimized for clips and conflict. Schieffer isn't promising neutrality; he's promising temperature control, the underrated skill of making powerful people answer questions without turning the exchange into a shouting match.
The stated intent is modest - speak "like normal people" - but the subtext is radical for broadcast news. It signals a desire to deprogram the genre from its default settings: confrontation over curiosity, gotcha over listening, the host as traffic cop corralling sound bites. Schieffer's career straddles a major shift in American media, from the old high-trust anchor model to the fragmented attention economy where being calm can read as being weak. His line is less nostalgia than strategy: if journalism wants credibility, it has to sound human again.
The phrase also smuggles in a moral position. "Normal people" is a rebuke to the insider dialect of Washington and the theatrical cadence of television. It's an argument that democracy is damaged when public talk is optimized for clips and conflict. Schieffer isn't promising neutrality; he's promising temperature control, the underrated skill of making powerful people answer questions without turning the exchange into a shouting match.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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