Politics & Power Quote by Charles Kuralt

Kuralt is selling a fantasy that journalists rarely get to inhabit: the roving eye with no boss, no deadline, no agenda but curiosity. Coming from a profession built on assignments and institutional priorities, his insistence that he “never had an assignment” reads less like a literal workplace detail and more like a declaration of method. He’s staking a claim for a kind of reporting that treats America not as a beat to be “covered,” but as a place to be encountered.

The repetition does the work. “Freedom,” “wander,” “no assignments,” “stories I wanted to do myself” creates a steady rhythm of refusal: refusal of the news cycle, of the manufactured urgency that turns events into product. The subtext is a quiet critique of conventional journalism’s conveyor belt. Kuralt implies that the most honest stories aren’t the ones an editor demands, but the ones that tug at a reporter’s private sense of wonder. In that framing, subjectivity isn’t a flaw; it’s the engine.

Context matters: Kuralt became synonymous with humane, small-town vignettes on CBS, a genre of American storytelling that sits adjacent to hard news but isn’t interchangeable with it. His voice offered viewers a respite from catastrophe coverage while still claiming journalistic legitimacy. That’s why the quote lands culturally: it captures an older, slower media ecology where a network could bankroll lingering attention - and it foreshadows our current hunger for “unassigned” reporting amid algorithmic churn. The line is wistful, but also strategic, burnishing a brand: not just a reporter, but a permission slip to look.