Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert McChesney

McChesney isn’t praising newspapers so much as indicting the media ecosystem that makes even their failures look noble. The jab lands because it’s an inversion of a familiar hierarchy: print journalism, long caricatured as elitist, slow, and self-important, becomes the accidental gold standard once you compare it to the churn of local broadcast news. That backhanded compliment is the point. He’s not romanticizing ink; he’s showing how low the bar has been driven elsewhere.

The intent is deliberately abrasive, a critic’s provocation designed to collapse any lingering neutrality about “different media doing different things.” By calling local news “appalling,” he’s aiming at the format’s structural incentives: small staffs, relentless deadlines, ad-driven programming, and a dependence on cheap, repeatable story templates (crime, weather panic, viral oddities) that fill time but rarely build understanding. The phrase “on both radio and television” widens the target: it’s not one platform’s bad habits, but a shared logic of speed, sensation, and scarcity.

Subtext: when a community’s primary information source is optimized for attention rather than accountability, democracy quietly degrades. Print “looks like the greatest stuff ever written” because newspapers, at their best, still signal verification, context, and institutional memory - the unglamorous machinery that lets the public track power over time. McChesney’s cynicism isn’t snobbery; it’s a warning about what happens when local journalism is treated as content instead of infrastructure.