Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Scheer

A veteran reporter is doing what reporters rarely get to do on the record: pulling back the curtain on who actually holds the power. Scheer’s point isn’t simply that a story got spiked or reshaped. It’s that the public-facing justification is theater. “Fine sounding words” is a scalpel phrase, puncturing the polished language institutions lean on when they want to make a business or political choice feel like an ethical one.

The syntax does a lot of work. “The decision came from the publisher” names the real locus of authority: ownership and revenue, not newsroom ideals. “It certainly was cleared by Chicago” widens the circle from one executive to a whole corporate chain of command, implicating the parent institution. The repetition of “and then” mimics the bureaucratic process itself: decisions made upstairs, then a communications layer deployed downstairs.

The subtext is a familiar media pathology: audiences are invoked as a moral alibi. Readers become a rhetorical shield - “our obligation,” “our relationship” - when what’s at stake is often advertiser pressure, political access, internal risk management, or brand protection. Scheer’s blunt closer, “It has nothing to do with that,” refuses the polite ambiguity that typically keeps these conflicts deniable.

Context matters because Scheer comes out of a tradition of adversarial journalism that treats institutional self-mythology as part of the story. He’s not arguing against accountability to readers; he’s accusing management of weaponizing that accountability language to launder a top-down decision. The intent is exposure: not of a single call, but of the PR habit that turns power into virtue by changing the label on the box.