War & Peace Quote by Robert Scheer

Scheer isn’t just naming an adversary; he’s staging a little morality play about who gets to decide what journalism is worth. By leading with “this guy” and the plain, almost sitcom-specific “Jeff Johnson,” he miniaturizes the target before the argument even starts. The detail that Johnson is “an accountant” is doing cultural work: it frames the critic as a bean-counter, someone fluent in ledgers but deaf to the civic function of a free press. It’s a classed jab, sure, but also a strategic one - Scheer is contrasting two value systems: accounting’s preference for tidy balance sheets versus journalism’s messy obligation to power and the public.

The repetition of “cares nothing… cares nothing” is prosecutorial. Scheer isn’t offering a nuanced debate about media bias; he’s building a character indictment: indifferent to press freedom, indifferent to journalism, politically committed (“right winger”), and morally compromised (“supported the war”). That last phrase is context-heavy: “the war” reads as Iraq, a touchstone where many American newsrooms, pundits, and institutions were tested and, in Scheer’s worldview, failed. By tethering Johnson’s politics to that decision, Scheer implies the critic’s hostility to Scheer’s writing isn’t aesthetic - it’s ideological, rooted in a pro-war posture that needed a quieter press.

The final twist - “couldn’t stand a word that I wrote” - exposes the subtext: this is about suppression dressed up as critique. Scheer is telling listeners that the attack isn’t on an article; it’s on the idea of adversarial journalism itself.