Daily Inspiration Quote by Art Buchwald

A perfect Buchwald jab: it flatters television as a serious institution just long enough to puncture it with a newspaper nerd’s sneer. “No page two” isn’t nostalgia for newsprint so much as a diagnosis of TV’s structural flaw. In the newspaper world, page one is the public face - wars, elections, the civic sermon. Page two is where the paper admits it’s also a product: the oddball feature, the gossip, the sly human-interest detour, the small pleasures that keep readers from feeling lectured. Buchwald’s line implies television is stuck in a perpetual page-one mode: a glowing box that tries to be everything at once, but without the tactile hierarchy that tells you what matters and what’s just there because you’re human.

The subtext is about control and pacing. A newspaper lets you skim, jump, ignore, linger. You can choose your own “page two” and quietly create distance from the day’s official story. Television, especially in Buchwald’s mid-to-late 20th-century context of three networks and appointment viewing, is a conveyor belt. It blends catastrophe, commercials, comedy, and tragedy into a single stream, forcing mood whiplash without offering a clear off-ramp. The joke lands because it’s not only about content; it’s about form. Buchwald is really mocking the medium’s inability to separate urgency from amusement, and by extension, its tendency to make everything feel equally loud - which is its own kind of editorial failure.