Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Jennings

Jennings is politely calling out a habit that turns citizens into partisans: treating the news like a custom playlist. The line lands because it sounds almost obvious, then quietly indicts the listener. If you curate your inputs to one “point of view,” you don’t just end up informed-you end up certain. And certainty, he suggests, is the gateway drug to moralizing: the other side isn’t merely different; it’s “wrong.”

The subtext is classic broadcast-era anxiety about fragmentation. Jennings came up when nightly network news still played referee for a mass audience, a time when the shared premise was that facts could be commonly held even if interpretations diverged. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, cable, talk radio, and early online media were eroding that common stage. His phrasing anticipates the algorithmic age before “filter bubble” became a TED Talk staple: tailoring doesn’t just narrow information; it trains your brain to experience disagreement as error rather than as an alternate reading of the same world.

Notice how he uses “well of course” and “somebody else” to soften the blow. He’s not scolding “idiots” for being biased; he’s describing a human default. That restraint is the rhetorical move. It keeps the door open for the viewer to change behavior without losing face. Coming from a journalist identified with institutional credibility, it’s also a defense of pluralistic news consumption as civic hygiene: not because neutrality is perfect, but because democracy collapses when we can’t even recognize how our own intake manufactures righteousness.