"There is such a thing as a national conscience, and it can be touched"
About this Quote
Kuralt’s line is a quiet rebuke dressed up as reassurance: you can’t shame a country the way you shame a person, but you can still make it flinch. Coming from a journalist who spent a career translating America to itself, “national conscience” isn’t some misty patriotic abstraction. It’s an editorial wager that a shared moral nerve exists beneath the noise of markets, partisanship, and regional self-mythology.
The verb does the heavy lifting. A conscience can be “touched” the way a bruise is touched: lightly, deliberately, enough to prove it still hurts. Kuralt is implying both vulnerability and latency. The conscience is there, but not automatically active; it needs contact. That makes the sentence a thesis for journalism at its best: not preaching, not scolding, but reporting with sufficient human specificity that denial becomes harder to maintain. A photo, a testimony, a small-town tragedy rendered plainly - these are the fingers on the bruise.
The subtext is also a warning. If a national conscience can be touched, it can also be numbed, diverted, or manipulated. Kuralt’s era saw televised war, civil rights footage, and scandal-driven distrust collide with a still-robust belief in mass media’s capacity to convene a public. His confidence feels almost radical now, when fragmentation makes “national” itself a contested category. The line lands as both hope and professional obligation: stories aren’t just information; they’re the instruments that test whether a country can still feel.
The verb does the heavy lifting. A conscience can be “touched” the way a bruise is touched: lightly, deliberately, enough to prove it still hurts. Kuralt is implying both vulnerability and latency. The conscience is there, but not automatically active; it needs contact. That makes the sentence a thesis for journalism at its best: not preaching, not scolding, but reporting with sufficient human specificity that denial becomes harder to maintain. A photo, a testimony, a small-town tragedy rendered plainly - these are the fingers on the bruise.
The subtext is also a warning. If a national conscience can be touched, it can also be numbed, diverted, or manipulated. Kuralt’s era saw televised war, civil rights footage, and scandal-driven distrust collide with a still-robust belief in mass media’s capacity to convene a public. His confidence feels almost radical now, when fragmentation makes “national” itself a contested category. The line lands as both hope and professional obligation: stories aren’t just information; they’re the instruments that test whether a country can still feel.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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