Daily Inspiration Quote by Michael Gartner

It lands like a compliment, but it’s really a dagger wrapped in network branding. Michael Gartner’s line isn’t praising Tom Brokaw so much as exploiting the weird, intimate way Americans once related to evening news anchors: not as interchangeable professionals, but as household characters whose flaws and virtues felt personal. By saying NBC’s “nicest thing” is simply “not Dan Rather,” Gartner turns the competitive landscape of broadcast journalism into a negative identity. NBC doesn’t have to be great; it just has to be the refuge from the other guy.

The subtext is sharper: credibility in TV news is less about institutional rigor than about the face delivering it. Brokaw, in this framing, becomes a proxy for steadiness, moderation, and a sort of Midwestern ease; Rather stands in for agitation, ego, or perceived partisan temperature. Gartner is also winking at the audience’s tribalism. Viewers don’t merely choose stories; they choose temperaments.

Context matters. Gartner came up in an era when ABC, CBS, and NBC were locked in a nightly prestige war, and anchors were the brand’s most valuable asset. The line reads like inside-baseball that’s meant to be overheard, a newsroom aside that assumes you’ve been watching the ratings race and the reputational skirmishes. It’s efficient media criticism: a whole argument about trust, competition, and personality-driven “objectivity” compressed into one petty, devastating comparison.