Science & Tech Quote by Bob Schieffer

There is a quiet admission of lost monopoly baked into Schieffer's plainspoken line: the evening news no longer owns "new". For most of broadcast history, the nightly anchor delivered the day's events with the authority of scarcity. Schieffer is describing what happens when scarcity collapses. If audiences arrive already briefed-by radio, cable, the early Internet-then the anchor's old job (first report, definitive recap) becomes redundant on arrival.

The phrase "we now assume" matters. It's not just a technological observation; it's an editorial posture shift. Assumption becomes strategy: stop treating viewers as blank slates and start treating them as participants in a rolling information stream. That reframes the evening news from being a conveyor belt of facts to something closer to an interpreter, a curator, a synthesizer. "Our job" isn't to be faster than the web. It's to be better than it: to impose narrative order, to add verification, and to explain why a story matters beyond the headline.

There's also a subtle note of institutional self-defense. Calling the job "a bit different" downplays the existential threat. It's diplomatic newsroom language for a tectonic change in media power: the audience has options, the gate has holes, and trust has to be earned through context, not simply inherited through airtime. In Schieffer's mild cadence you can hear a profession trying to pivot without sounding panicked.