"When I was a little boy I used to borrow my father's hat, and make a press card to stick in the hat band. That was the way reporters were always portrayed in the movies"
About this Quote
Kuralt is sneaking up on something tender and slightly accusatory: the way mass culture scripts our ambitions before we’ve even named them. The image is all prop and playacting - a borrowed hat, a homemade “press card,” the tiny cosplay of authority. He’s not bragging about an early calling so much as admitting that the calling arrived prepackaged, delivered by movies that reduced “reporter” to a costume you could slip on and instantly belong to a world of urgency and importance.
The intent is modest on the surface, but the subtext is sharper. If a child’s first model of journalism is Hollywood shorthand, then the profession’s mythos is inseparable from performance. Kuralt is pointing to how public trust and professional identity get built on visual clichés: the hatband credential, the swagger of access, the implied right to ask questions and be answered. That’s both charming and unsettling. It suggests journalism isn’t only a craft learned through ethics, reporting, and discipline; it’s also an imagined role, a social permission slip.
Context matters: Kuralt made his name by roaming America and treating everyday people as worthy subjects. His childhood “press card” foreshadows that impulse - not toward celebrity, but toward entry. The line quietly contrasts the cinematic reporter (fast-talking, city-bound, omniscient) with Kuralt’s own later style: patient, curious, skeptical of glamour. The nostalgia isn’t just for boyhood; it’s for a time when the press still looked, in the popular imagination, like something you could trust because it looked like something at all.
The intent is modest on the surface, but the subtext is sharper. If a child’s first model of journalism is Hollywood shorthand, then the profession’s mythos is inseparable from performance. Kuralt is pointing to how public trust and professional identity get built on visual clichés: the hatband credential, the swagger of access, the implied right to ask questions and be answered. That’s both charming and unsettling. It suggests journalism isn’t only a craft learned through ethics, reporting, and discipline; it’s also an imagined role, a social permission slip.
Context matters: Kuralt made his name by roaming America and treating everyday people as worthy subjects. His childhood “press card” foreshadows that impulse - not toward celebrity, but toward entry. The line quietly contrasts the cinematic reporter (fast-talking, city-bound, omniscient) with Kuralt’s own later style: patient, curious, skeptical of glamour. The nostalgia isn’t just for boyhood; it’s for a time when the press still looked, in the popular imagination, like something you could trust because it looked like something at all.
Quote Details
| Topic | Father |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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