Politics & Power Quote by Charles Kuralt

Kuralt’s line is a small act of defiance against the news cycle’s addiction to spectacle. The opening move, “It does no harm,” is sly: he frames optimism not as virtue, but as a mildly suspect indulgence, like dessert. That tone matters because he’s speaking to an audience trained to equate seriousness with crisis. By calling calm an “acknowledg[ment],” he implies it’s been deliberately edited out.

The subtext is a critique of agenda-setting. If the nation is perpetually “in flames,” it’s partly because the camera keeps panning toward smoke. Kuralt’s triad - “politicians, entertainers, and criminals” - is not random; it maps the three easy story engines of modern media: power, fame, and transgression. Each delivers ready-made conflict and a clear villain or hero, which makes them efficient for broadcast and irresistible for audiences. The cost is epistemic: whole categories of citizens disappear because ordinary life doesn’t spike ratings or reward hot takes.

Contextually, Kuralt’s career on CBS, especially his “On the Road” segments, was built on insisting that civic reality is larger than Washington and scandal. The line reads like a defense of that editorial philosophy at a moment when television news was accelerating toward personality, polarization, and crime-as-entertainment.

There’s an ethical wager here: democracy doesn’t just need watchdogs; it needs witnesses. Not to sanitize the country, but to keep the definition of “the country” from shrinking to whoever shouts loudest or bleeds most on camera.