Leadership Quote by Adlai E. Stevenson

Stevenson’s line flatters journalism with one hand and slaps it with the other. The opening metaphor borrows the Bible’s moral economy: wheat is nourishment, chaff is waste, and the editor is the sober-minded sorter. Then comes the twist - editors “print the chaff” - a punchline that reframes the whole process as performative virtue masking a perverse incentive. It’s not that newspapers can’t recognize what matters. It’s that they often choose not to publish it.

The intent is political, and almost certainly defensive. Stevenson, a cerebral Democratic standard-bearer in the age of television soundbites and Cold War anxiety, had plenty of reasons to resent how complexity gets sanded down into spectacle. The jab targets the press as an institution that claims enlightenment values (fact, judgment, public service) while rewarding what sells: conflict, novelty, scandal, the easy misinterpretation. “Chaff” is also what politics produces in abundance - gaffes, personality quirks, trivial controversies - and the quote suggests editors amplify that material because it’s cheaper than nuance and louder than policy.

Subtext: the modern public sphere isn’t failing from lack of information but from selective filtration. The gatekeepers are competent; they’re just captured by attention economics and the competitive need to fill columns. Stevenson’s wit works because it concedes the editor’s power, then indicts how that power is used. It’s a politician’s complaint, but it lands as a broader diagnosis of media incentives: the machinery can sort truth from noise, yet it often monetizes the noise.