Daily Inspiration Quote by Jessica Savitch

Savitch’s line is a calm rebuke to a fantasy the media industry keeps trying to sell: that the world will cooperate with the rundown. The sentence hinges on two kinds of “cannot.” One is practical (events are unruly); the other is philosophical (attempts to impose narrative order are, at best, self-deception). By pairing “news events” with “newscasts,” she widens the critique from reality itself to the machinery built to package it. The problem isn’t only that breaking news is unpredictable; it’s that the format of television quietly pressures journalists to pretend it isn’t.

The contrast with “entertainment shows” is doing sharp cultural work. Entertainment is mapped, paced, rehearsed, and paywalled behind a promise: every segment will land. News, in theory, is the opposite - a public service that answers to contingency. In practice, broadcast news has long borrowed entertainment’s grammar: cliffhangers, heroes, villains, “tonight at 11.” Savitch is warning that when you storyboard the world, you start editing reality to match your storyboard. That’s where distortions creep in: overconfident anchors, premature certainty, speculative chatter that fills airtime because airtime must be filled.

Context matters. Savitch rose during the late-70s/early-80s transformation of TV news into a high-stakes ratings arena. Her credibility was forged in live, volatile situations where composure isn’t a performance style but a moral stance. The subtext is almost ethical: respect the chaos. Don’t demand a plot from tragedy, don’t force clean endings, don’t confuse production value with truth.