Daily Inspiration Quote by Bob Schieffer

There is an old-school sting in Schieffer's complaint: a veteran journalist watching the craft get quietly devalued while the product still pretends to be about words. The line lands because it sounds almost mild, even puzzled, yet it smuggles in an indictment. If newspapers are no longer filtering for "good writer", then what are they selecting for instead? Speed, click-worthiness, ideological signaling, cheap aggregation, the ability to feed a 24/7 digital pipeline without making editors break stride.

Schieffer's phrasing matters. "Nowadays" is a soft trigger for cultural decline narratives, but he avoids the easy nostalgia trap by refusing to name a villain. "I'm not even sure" frames the problem as uncertainty, not outrage, which makes it harder to dismiss as crankiness. It's the voice of someone who has seen the internal incentives change: shrinking newsrooms, fewer copy editors, metrics-dominated decision-making, and the idea that a story's performance can be quantified more convincingly than its prose can be argued for.

The subtext is about power and respect inside institutions. Writing isn't just decoration; it's how reporting earns authority, how complexity becomes legible, how trust is built. When papers stop valuing good writers, Schieffer implies, they aren't merely lowering a stylistic bar. They're swapping a civic craft for a content workflow, and hoping no one notices the difference until it becomes impossible to read past.