Love Quote by Jim Lehrer

Lehrer’s line lands with the calm confidence of someone who spent decades making a single, nightly broadcast feel like civic infrastructure. On the surface, it’s a genial celebration of choice: news everywhere, conversation everywhere, inquiry everywhere. The repetition of “so many” functions like a soft drumbeat, insisting abundance is inherently healthy. Coming from a PBS anchor whose brand was steadiness, it reads as both endorsement and self-preservation: a legacy journalist blessing a fragmented ecosystem rather than scolding it.

The subtext is more complicated. “Any way they want” is the democratic promise and the democratic problem. It frames consumption as pure personal preference, like picking a playlist, sidestepping the less flattering reality that the “ways” people get news are often engineered by incentives: virality, outrage, algorithmic sorting, tribal identity. Lehrer doesn’t mention gatekeeping, but he’s quietly renegotiating it. In the broadcast era, the gate existed; his job was to stand at it, judiciously. In the multi-outlet era, the gate dissolves, and he pivots to a different ideal: debate and inquiry as the new safeguards.

Context matters: this is a figure associated with restraint, understatement, and a belief that tone is part of truth-telling. So the quote’s optimism isn’t naive so much as strategic. Lehrer is arguing that legitimacy can survive decentralization if the public adopts the habits he modeled - patience, curiosity, and discussion that aims at understanding instead of winning. The unspoken anxiety is that the avenues are multiplying faster than those habits.