Politics & Power Quote by William Scranton

A polite indictment can land harder than a shout, and Scranton’s does. He’s talking about the early days of the Three Mile Island crisis, when everyone with a phone and a credential suddenly became an authority. The line pivots on a careful contrast: people are “not hesitating” to opine, but those opinions are “not very well informed.” It’s less a scolding of malice than a diagnosis of a system that rewards speed, access, and confidence over understanding.

The specific intent is managerial and political at once: Scranton is trying to cool the temperature, to reassert expertise, and to defend on-the-ground decision-making from the fog of Washington chatter. By naming “NRC or in Congress,” he points to the pipeline of secondhand certainty: staffers, aides, and agency contacts feeding reporters and politicians fragments that harden into narratives before the facts stabilize. “Calling their Washington sources” is a subtle demotion of the whole operation, suggesting that proximity to power is being mistaken for proximity to truth.

The subtext is about accountability. In a technical emergency, bad information isn’t just embarrassing; it can shape public behavior, trigger political overreaction, and erode trust for years. Scranton’s “frankly” signals he’s choosing to break the usual etiquette and say what officials often only imply: that the loudest voices in a crisis are frequently the least equipped to interpret it. The sentence captures a recurring American tension: democratic oversight versus technocratic reality, with the media-amplified capital as both referee and accelerant.