Aging & Wisdom Quote by Harry Reasoner

Reasoner’s line lands like a grin you don’t fully trust: part confession, part insult, and entirely calibrated for a business built on appearances. By stacking “profession, or craft, or racket,” he uses a self-undermining escalation that mirrors journalism’s own uneasy self-mythology. We want to be seen as principled artisans; we fear we’re hustlers; we know we’re also employees. The joke is that all three labels fit, depending on the day’s deadline and the size of the sponsor.

The “never wanted to grow up” jab isn’t really about immaturity so much as perpetual adolescence as a job description: staying curious, nosy, contrarian, and allergic to the settled logic of “the real world.” Reporters spend their lives turning other people’s certainty into questions. That posture can look like refusal to commit, a career-long permission slip to hover at the edges of institutions rather than belong to them. It’s also a defense mechanism: if you admit you’re playing a role, you’re harder to capture.

Context matters. Reasoner came up in mid-century American broadcast news, an era that tried to sell gravitas as a product: the reassuring anchor voice, the illusion of neutral authority, the priestly tone. His line punctures that sanctimony from the inside. It’s newsroom gallows humor aimed at journalists who want the moral prestige of public service without acknowledging the incentives that nudge the work toward spectacle, access-trading, and performance.

Calling it a “racket” isn’t anti-journalism; it’s a warning label. The craft survives, Reasoner implies, only if its practitioners keep laughing at their own temptations.