Daily Inspiration Quote by John Gunther

Journalism, Gunther suggests, is less a neutral receptacle for “what happened” than an active hunt with a target already sketched. The first move is not gathering facts but defining appetite: what, exactly, is worth prying loose from the fog of events. That framing is quietly polemical. It demotes the romantic idea of the reporter as passive witness and promotes the reporter as strategist, someone who chooses a line of inquiry and accepts that choice will shape everything downstream.

Then comes the harder, slightly unsentimental truth: information is social before it is factual. “Who will tell you” is an admission that access is a craft, not a perk. Stories live inside gatekeepers, sources with incentives, and people who know where the bodies are buried and where the paperwork is filed. Gunther’s phrasing dodges pieties about objectivity; it’s about leverage, trust, and timing. The reporter’s job is to map a human network as rigorously as they map a paper trail.

The subtext is a warning and a dare. If you don’t know what you want to know, you’ll settle for what’s easy to obtain: the press release, the staged quote, the official narrative. If you can’t identify who will tell you, you’ll confuse “no comment” with “no story.” Coming from a mid-century journalist who worked in an era of powerful institutions and carefully managed public images, the line reads like field notes from the access economy before we had a name for it. It also anticipates today’s reality: the crucial “who” might be a whistleblower, a leaked database, or an algorithmic trail, but the principle remains brutally current.