Daily Inspiration Quote by Sam Donaldson

There is a wonderfully plainspoken flex hiding inside Donaldson's modesty. "It was kind of exciting" sounds like a shrug, but it’s a journalist’s way of admitting a truth about power: access feels electric because it’s scarce. The second sentence lands the punch with deadpan simplicity. "Not everybody was on the radio" isn’t just nostalgia for a broadcast era; it’s a reminder that mass media used to be a gated kingdom. If your voice made it onto the airwaves, you weren’t merely speaking, you were being selected.

Donaldson came up when radio and network news functioned like national stages, not infinite feeds. That context matters. In a pre-internet America, being on the radio meant instant legitimacy: you weren’t competing with millions of amateur broadcasters, you were joining a small priesthood of voices deemed worth amplifying. The excitement he describes is partly professional pride, partly the thrill of entering the room where public reality gets narrated.

The subtext is also lightly self-mocking, a signature of seasoned reporters who understand how absurd it can be to feel important simply because a microphone is present. Yet it’s not cynical; it’s observational. Donaldson is pointing to a structural fact: media scarcity manufactures prestige. Read now, in an age where everyone can "go live" in seconds, the line doubles as a quiet elegy for a time when the public sphere had fewer megaphones and, for better and worse, clearer arbiters of whose voices mattered.