Time & Perspective Quote by Walter Winchell

News, Winchell is saying, is less a parade of surprises than a rotating cast in the same old tragedies. The line lands because it yanks the glamour out of the daily headline cycle: yesterday's catastrophe had names and faces; today it has new ones; tomorrow will too. The structure is almost nursery-simple, built on repetition and substitution, and that is the point. It mimics the mechanical churn of mass media, where events get templated into familiar shapes and the public is trained to consume them as interchangeable episodes.

Winchell wrote from inside the early 20th-century attention machine he helped build: the syndicated column, the radio bulletin, the celebrity scandal and the crime blotter blended into a single national feed. His intent isn't soothing fatalism so much as a hard-edged indictment of how quickly novelty replaces empathy. "Only to different people" is the dagger. It acknowledges real suffering while exposing how easily audiences file it away as not-theirs, and how institutions let repetition stand in for accountability. If the same things keep happening, someone is benefiting, someone is failing, or both.

There's cynicism here, but also a moral trap for the reader: if you're nodding along, you're already participating in the very desensitization he sketches. It's a line that anticipates today's doomscrolling logic, where the algorithm serves recurrence as content and we mistake constant change of victims for actual change in the world.