Daily Inspiration Quote by Bob Schieffer

The line lands like a sigh with a press badge clipped to it: weary, practiced, and quietly defensive. Schieffer’s “We’re far from perfect” is an admission that sounds candid but functions as strategy. It lowers the bar just enough to make criticism feel unreasonable, reframing scrutiny as impatience with the basic messiness of being alive. Then comes the pivot that does the real work: “It’s a human enterprise.” Not “our enterprise,” not “this newsroom,” but humanity itself, drafted as a shield.

The intent is to preserve trust without promising purity. Schieffer, a long-time face of broadcast authority, is speaking from inside a profession that sells certainty while living on deadlines, limited information, and institutional blind spots. The subtext is: if you want flawless, you’re asking for something that doesn’t exist; if you’re angry, direct it at the condition, not the craft. That’s a subtle repositioning of responsibility, and it’s rhetorically effective because it replaces the language of accountability (“error,” “correction,” “bias”) with the language of inevitability (“human”).

Context matters here: this is the kind of sentence that surfaces when journalism is under fire - after a high-profile mistake, amid accusations of agenda, or during a broader collapse in public faith. It’s both humility and boundary-setting. Schieffer acknowledges fallibility, but he also asks the audience to keep watching anyway, to grant journalism the same grace we give other flawed institutions we can’t fully do without.