"Just about any story we think about doing, whether we've read it in a newspaper, heard it on the radio or come upon it through word of mouth - by the time you get there, every other network, cable station and talk show is already racing to the scene"
About this Quote
Chung is puncturing the romantic myth of the lone reporter sprinting toward truth with nothing but grit and a notepad. In her telling, the chase is already crowded before it begins: the “scene” isn’t a destination but a marketplace, and every outlet arrives not just to witness but to compete, frame, and claim. The line works because it’s half practical complaint, half institutional diagnosis. She’s describing a media ecology where speed is rewarded more reliably than insight, and where being first becomes a proxy for being right.
The list of inputs - newspaper, radio, word of mouth - sketches a pre-social-media version of what now looks like an algorithmic stampede. Even then, stories weren’t discovered so much as circulated, amplified, and turned into assignments once they reached a certain volume. Chung’s weary “by the time you get there” carries the subtext of inevitability: the journalist’s agency is limited, because the competitive logic of the industry sets the pace. You can almost hear the producer in the background, asking what angle makes it “ours” if everyone’s already on it.
Context matters: Chung came up in an era when network news held enormous cultural power, but cable and talk formats were multiplying and learning to feed off the same moments. Her point isn’t nostalgia; it’s a warning about homogenization. When everyone races to the same scene, the risk isn’t just redundancy. It’s a narrowing of attention, where complex events get processed into interchangeable live shots, and the story becomes less about what happened than about who got there fastest to narrate it.
The list of inputs - newspaper, radio, word of mouth - sketches a pre-social-media version of what now looks like an algorithmic stampede. Even then, stories weren’t discovered so much as circulated, amplified, and turned into assignments once they reached a certain volume. Chung’s weary “by the time you get there” carries the subtext of inevitability: the journalist’s agency is limited, because the competitive logic of the industry sets the pace. You can almost hear the producer in the background, asking what angle makes it “ours” if everyone’s already on it.
Context matters: Chung came up in an era when network news held enormous cultural power, but cable and talk formats were multiplying and learning to feed off the same moments. Her point isn’t nostalgia; it’s a warning about homogenization. When everyone races to the same scene, the risk isn’t just redundancy. It’s a narrowing of attention, where complex events get processed into interchangeable live shots, and the story becomes less about what happened than about who got there fastest to narrate it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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