Success Quote by Tina Brown

There is something deliciously acidic in Brown's choice of "absurdly": it doesn't just accuse the networks of exaggeration, it mocks the desperation behind it. The line targets a very particular media tic from the cable-news era onward, when anchors stopped being presenters and started being branded as quasi-heroes. "Reporting cred" becomes a kind of currency the networks keep trying to mint on-air, through breathless promos, self-congratulatory bios, and the ritual invocation of an anchor's supposed toughness, access, and gravitas.

Brown's intent is less to fact-check any one anchor than to expose a structural insecurity: television news knows it's selling performance as much as information, so it overcompensates. "To win respect" implies the respect isn't freely given anymore; it's being chased, negotiated, purchased with hype. The subtext is that the audience has become skeptical of institutions and that networks, rather than earning trust through transparent reporting, attempt to launder legitimacy through celebrity. An anchor isn't merely competent; they're "award-winning", "frontline", "exclusive", "embedded" - adjectives as armor.

As an editor, Brown is also defending older forms of journalistic authority (shoe-leather reporting, editorial rigor) against a medium that rewards presence, not proof. The real critique lands on the word "seem": she frames this as a collective self-delusion inside TV news culture. The networks aren't lying exactly; they're trapped in a feedback loop where credibility is marketed so aggressively it starts to look like the very thing it claims to be: a pose.