Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Scheer

There is a quiet flex hiding inside the shrug. "The paper nominated me 12 or 13 times for the Pulitzer Prize" sounds like a brag, but it’s carefully routed through an institution: not I earned, not I won, but the paper nominated. Scheer’s sentence performs a journalist’s version of modesty politics, where ambition has to be laundered through the newsroom and recognition must arrive as if incidental. The imprecision of "12 or 13" is doing work, too: it signals a life lived at speed, in deadlines and decades, while also signaling that the exact number isn’t the point. The point is the repeated near-miss.

That repetition carries the subtext of American journalism’s pecking order. Pulitzer talk is how the industry sorts prestige, and nominations become a proxy for value even when the prize never lands. Scheer, long associated with adversarial reporting and unapologetically left-leaning commentary, knows that formal honors can be both validation and gatekeeping. "Nominated" is a credential, but also a reminder of the club’s velvet rope: you can be essential to public life and still be forever adjacent to its most mythologized trophy.

Context matters: Scheer’s career spans eras when investigative journalism was lionized and punished in the same breath. The quote reads like a résumé line delivered with a wry edge, a way of saying: I was in the fight, repeatedly, and the record shows it - even if the official story of greatness stopped just short of the headline.