Leadership Quote by Richard M. Nixon

Nixon is admitting something most media consumers practice but rarely confess: you don’t read a paper because it’s “right,” you read it because it’s useful. The line lands as a backhanded defense of pluralism, but it’s also a politician’s survival strategy dressed up as tolerance. He’s saying that offense, bias, or bad taste are not defects to be purged; they’re the cost of staying informed in a noisy democracy.

The joke is in the exaggeration. If you demanded consistently good editorials and cartoons, you’d end up with nothing to read. That’s a sly jab at the moralizing impulse to treat journalism as a subscription to one’s own worldview. It also flatters the reader as resilient, grown-up, capable of absorbing irritation without reaching for the unsubscribe button.

Context matters because Nixon had a famously adversarial relationship with the press, one shaped by perceived elite hostility and later cemented by Watergate-era scrutiny. Coming from him, the sentiment isn’t a Hallmark ode to free expression; it’s a pragmatic concession that the press will always needle power, fairly or not, and that retreating into silence is a self-inflicted wound. The subtext is almost transactional: you tolerate the paper’s worst instincts because you need its reporting, its access, its agenda-setting. In a time when partisan media ecosystems and “cancel the outlet” habits have become default, Nixon’s quip reads less like magnanimity and more like a reminder that discomfort is part of the information diet.