Daily Inspiration Quote by Daniel Schorr

Murrow is being held up here as the last adult in the room, and Schorr knows exactly what he is doing with that contrast. The line draws a clean moral boundary between journalism as a civic instrument and journalism as a market product. "Because it needed coverage" is the key phrase: necessity, not novelty; consequence, not clickability. It frames reporting as triage. Some events are bleeding in public, and the job is to show up with a camera and a conscience, whether or not it flatters the audience's appetites.

Schorr's subtext is a rebuke aimed at the industry that rose after Murrow helped define broadcast credibility. By the time Schorr is reflecting on him, TV news has drifted toward ratings logic: stories selected for their ability to hold viewers, personalities trained to become the story, conflict packaged as entertainment. The quiet sting is in the second sentence. Murrow wasn't "trying to get an audience" suggests that chasing attention is inherently corrupting, that it nudges editors and anchors toward spectacle, toward melodrama, toward the safe narratives that keep people watching rather than the hard truths that make people uneasy.

Context matters: Murrow's legacy is bound to WWII radio reports and the 1954 "See It Now" takedown of McCarthyism, moments when the press tested its own courage. Schorr, himself shaped by Cold War battles over secrecy and dissent, isn't just praising a colleague. He's mourning a standard: journalism that accepts the cost of doing the necessary story, even when the audience arrives late or not at all.