Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Utley

There is a cold professionalism to Utley’s line, and it’s meant to sound like ethics. “We never search for scandal” positions journalism as restrained, almost reluctant: the reporter as civic functionary, not voyeur. Then the pivot: “but we use it.” The moral burden quietly moves from the newsroom to the world outside it. Scandal isn’t hunted; it “cries out.” Like a siren or a fire alarm, it demands attention, and the journalist merely responds.

That’s the sleight of hand. Personifying scandal turns editorial choice into inevitability. Someone, somewhere, has already made the mess; the paper is just documenting the excess. The phrase “if it cries out to excess” is especially telling: it suggests a threshold, a line beyond which private vice becomes public material. But who draws that line? Utley’s “we” sounds collective and principled, yet it also shields individual judgment inside institutional authority.

Context matters: Utley worked in a British press culture where scandal has long been both moral theater and market engine, from Profumo-era hypocrisies to the broader postwar appetite for exposing the gap between public virtue and private behavior. His sentence doubles as a compact defense against the perennial charge that journalists manufacture outrage. It admits the appetite for drama while insisting on restraint.

The intent, then, isn’t just to justify running scandal; it’s to launder it as duty. Scandal becomes not a commodity but a civic signal - conveniently loud when circulation needs it to be.