Daily Inspiration Quote by Pat Oliphant

Nostalgia can be a weapon, and Pat Oliphant wields it like a sharpened pen. By framing journalism as something that once had “cachet,” he’s not just mourning a lost golden age; he’s indicting the present for cheapening a craft that used to confer civic status. The first sentence lands like a sigh disguised as an observation: “more noble” implies an ethical hierarchy, a time when the press could plausibly claim moral authority rather than mere attention. Then he undercuts even that with a shrugging second line - “I don’t know if…” - a classic satirist’s move: feigned uncertainty that actually heightens the accusation. If the nobility is now debatable, that’s the point.

Coming from a political cartoonist, the subtext sharpens. Oliphant spent a career translating institutional hypocrisy into a single image and a single punchline; he watched journalism’s self-mythology up close, and he watched it get monetized. “Cachet” is telling: not truth, not public service, but social value. He’s hinting that the press once enjoyed deference - editors as gatekeepers, newspapers as shared reality - and that this prestige helped journalism do its job. Strip that away and you don’t just lose glamour; you lose leverage.

The context isn’t only partisan distrust. It’s the churn of 24/7 news, the collapse of local papers, the rise of personality-driven punditry, and an attention economy that rewards heat over verification. Oliphant’s line works because it mourns without sentimentalizing: the implied question is whether journalism can reclaim legitimacy when the culture no longer agrees on what legitimacy looks like.