Daily Inspiration Quote by Bob Schieffer

A working journalist’s quiet admission: the old bargain of “we’ll tell you what happened” doesn’t clear the bar anymore. Schieffer frames the shift as practical, almost technical - headlines aren’t sufficient; they need context and perspective - but the subtext is a defense of legitimacy in an era when legitimacy is constantly challenged. He’s describing a newsroom pivot that’s also a cultural pivot: the information firehose made the commodity (raw facts) cheap, while the scarce resource became meaning.

The phrasing does a lot of rhetorical work. “No longer just” concedes that straight reporting is still the baseline, but it also implies that the baseline has been degraded by the environment: fragmented audiences, speed-driven publishing, and a public trained to experience news as an endless scroll. “Trying” is modest, even self-protective. It’s an inoculation against the charge of bias, acknowledging that perspective is an effort, not a claim to omniscience.

Schieffer’s intent is to draw a line between interpretation and distortion. He’s arguing that context is not an optional garnish; it’s a corrective to the way headlines travel - stripped of nuance, optimized for shock, and shared without the surrounding facts that give them shape. Coming from a broadcast veteran whose career spans from the three-network era to cable and social media, the quote reads like a late-career justification for explanatory journalism: if the public is drowning in updates, the job becomes less stenography and more translation.