"When the anchorman is wearing a colonel's uniform, it tells you something"
About this Quote
A news desk is supposed to be the last place a uniform matters. So when Linda Ellerbee points out an anchorman dressed as a colonel, she is diagnosing a cultural illness: the moment journalism stops describing power and starts borrowing its costume.
The specific intent is bluntly skeptical. The uniform is not neutral wardrobe; it is an argument. It signals allegiance, authority, and hierarchy before a word is spoken. Ellerbee is warning that viewers are being cued to trust the spectacle of command rather than the discipline of reporting. In a medium where credibility is partly performance, military dress turns the anchor into an extension of the institution he should be interrogating.
The subtext is about how easily patriotism becomes a production technique. A colonel's uniform on-air collapses the distance between observer and participant, turning war into branding and the newsroom into a recruiting poster. It also reverses the intended flow of accountability: instead of the press holding the military to scrutiny, the military aesthetic supplies the press with borrowed legitimacy. The uniform does the rhetorical work of preempting doubt: if he looks like "one of them", the story feels safer, cleaner, less morally complicated.
Context matters: Ellerbee's career spans the rise of TV news as theater, the cable era's appetite for certainty, and the post-9/11 period when dissent could be framed as disloyalty. Her line lands because it's small and visual, a single costume choice that exposes a larger shift. The telling detail isn't that an anchor might respect the troops; it's that he needs their authority to sell the news.
The specific intent is bluntly skeptical. The uniform is not neutral wardrobe; it is an argument. It signals allegiance, authority, and hierarchy before a word is spoken. Ellerbee is warning that viewers are being cued to trust the spectacle of command rather than the discipline of reporting. In a medium where credibility is partly performance, military dress turns the anchor into an extension of the institution he should be interrogating.
The subtext is about how easily patriotism becomes a production technique. A colonel's uniform on-air collapses the distance between observer and participant, turning war into branding and the newsroom into a recruiting poster. It also reverses the intended flow of accountability: instead of the press holding the military to scrutiny, the military aesthetic supplies the press with borrowed legitimacy. The uniform does the rhetorical work of preempting doubt: if he looks like "one of them", the story feels safer, cleaner, less morally complicated.
Context matters: Ellerbee's career spans the rise of TV news as theater, the cable era's appetite for certainty, and the post-9/11 period when dissent could be framed as disloyalty. Her line lands because it's small and visual, a single costume choice that exposes a larger shift. The telling detail isn't that an anchor might respect the troops; it's that he needs their authority to sell the news.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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