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Daily Inspiration Quote by Gwen Ifill

"We will wait to see if it is a doozy before we decide how to cover it, and what it all means"

About this Quote

News isn’t just what happens; it’s what gets framed as consequential, and Gwen Ifill lets you see the gears turning. “We will wait to see if it is a doozy” sounds breezy, even a little playful, but it lands like a quiet admission of power: journalists don’t merely report events, they calibrate significance in real time. The word “doozy” is doing double duty. It punctures the solemnity that public life often demands while also naming the brutal truth about attention economics: magnitude determines airtime.

The second clause sharpens the edge. “Before we decide how to cover it” acknowledges editorial construction, the choices that make a story legible - angle, sources, narrative arc. Then comes the most revealing phrase: “and what it all means.” That’s the subtext modern audiences sense but rarely hear stated so plainly. Meaning doesn’t arrive prepackaged; it’s negotiated among institutions, and the press is one of the loudest negotiators.

Read in Ifill’s context - a public broadcaster navigating partisan pressure, shrinking attention spans, and the perpetual “breaking news” treadmill - the line functions like a professional ethic and a warning. Wait, verify, assess impact. But it also hints at the trap: if you wait for “doozies,” you risk missing the slow-burn stories that actually govern people’s lives. It’s a sentence that captures journalism’s central tension: restraint versus relevance, humility versus agenda-setting, and the uneasy fact that “coverage” can become the event itself.

Quote Details

TopicDecision-Making
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Ifill, Gwen. (2026, January 16). We will wait to see if it is a doozy before we decide how to cover it, and what it all means. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-will-wait-to-see-if-it-is-a-doozy-before-we-82660/

Chicago Style
Ifill, Gwen. "We will wait to see if it is a doozy before we decide how to cover it, and what it all means." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-will-wait-to-see-if-it-is-a-doozy-before-we-82660/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We will wait to see if it is a doozy before we decide how to cover it, and what it all means." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-will-wait-to-see-if-it-is-a-doozy-before-we-82660/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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We Will Wait to See If It Is a Doozy - Gwen Ifill
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About the Author

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Gwen Ifill (September 29, 1955 - November 14, 2016) was a Journalist from USA.

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