Daily Inspiration Quote by Jim Lehrer

There is a quiet alarm bell in Jim Lehrer’s phrasing: “increasingly fewer and fewer” isn’t just redundancy, it’s insistence. He’s not polishing a statistic; he’s underlining a drift he believes the profession can’t afford. Coming from a newsroom elder who made authority look like calm, the line reads as a warning about a gap in lived knowledge that changes what gets asked, what gets believed, and what gets missed.

The intent is practical, not nostalgic. Lehrer isn’t romanticizing soldier-journalists; he’s pointing at an epistemic problem. When reporters lack military experience, the subtext goes, coverage tilts toward what is legible to civilians: strategy as politics, conflict as spectacle, war as a series of official briefings. The granular reality of command culture, boredom, fear, dark humor, moral injury, and the slow administrative machinery of violence becomes harder to translate. Without that fluency, journalists can be more easily managed by euphemism and choreography: “surgical strikes,” “collateral damage,” “mission accomplished.” The words arrive pre-sanitized, and an unseasoned ear may not hear what’s been shaved off.

Context matters: post-Vietnam America moved to an all-volunteer force, creating a growing civil-military divide. Newsrooms professionalized, downsized, and centralized even as wars in Iraq and Afghanistan sprawled into decades. Lehrer is naming a structural mismatch: the country asks a small slice of its population to fight, then asks an even smaller slice to explain it. His worry isn’t that journalists lack bravery. It’s that without proximity, accountability gets abstracted, and abstraction is where wars go to hide.