"The most important event I covered was the Panama Canal debate, which dragged on for months"
About this Quote
Calling the Panama Canal debate the most important event she covered is Jessica Savitch quietly staking a claim about what counts as history: not the glamour of breaking news, but the long, grinding business of power being renegotiated in public. The Canal fight in the late 1970s was procedural, polarizing, and easy to caricature as Beltway tedium. Savitch’s line pushes back against that cultural reflex. If you’re a television journalist in an era that’s starting to reward speed, spectacle, and clean story arcs, admitting that the defining assignment “dragged on for months” is almost a provocation.
The intent is twofold. She’s credentialing herself with proximity to a rare kind of national argument: sovereignty, empire, and American identity compressed into treaty language and Senate votes. At the same time, she’s rehabilitating duration as a journalistic virtue. “Dragged on” signals the lived reality of covering governance: repetition, incremental shifts, late-night whip counts, the way a narrative becomes a siege. It also nods to the audience’s impatience. Savitch is acknowledging what viewers felt, then insisting it mattered anyway.
Subtextually, it’s a defense of seriousness in a medium often accused of superficiality. The Canal debate wasn’t just about a strip of land; it was about whether the U.S. could accept limits without calling it decline. Savitch’s memory makes a case that democracy’s biggest moments can look, on television, like endurance.
The intent is twofold. She’s credentialing herself with proximity to a rare kind of national argument: sovereignty, empire, and American identity compressed into treaty language and Senate votes. At the same time, she’s rehabilitating duration as a journalistic virtue. “Dragged on” signals the lived reality of covering governance: repetition, incremental shifts, late-night whip counts, the way a narrative becomes a siege. It also nods to the audience’s impatience. Savitch is acknowledging what viewers felt, then insisting it mattered anyway.
Subtextually, it’s a defense of seriousness in a medium often accused of superficiality. The Canal debate wasn’t just about a strip of land; it was about whether the U.S. could accept limits without calling it decline. Savitch’s memory makes a case that democracy’s biggest moments can look, on television, like endurance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work |
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