Politics & Power Quote by Linda Chavez

Chavez is doing a neat rhetorical judo move: she takes journalism's signature virtue, skepticism, and recasts it as a partisan tell. The sentence is built to sound like a scolding from inside the house, not an attack from the outside. "Where journalists have gotten themselves in trouble" implies self-inflicted wounds, a profession that drifted from craft into habit. Then comes the key limiter: "often extends only". Skepticism isn't condemned; it's selectively distributed skepticism that becomes the sin.

The target list is doing heavy political work. "American officials" and "the U.S. military" invoke institutions conservatives often treat as default-legitimate, even sacred. Pairing them with "Republican politicians" collapses patriotism and party into one grievance: reporters are framed as adversarial to the nation and the right simultaneously. Subtext: the press isn't merely critical; it's culturally alien, predisposed to doubt certain forms of authority while granting an easier pass to others (implicitly Democrats, activists, international bodies, or fashionable expert consensus).

Context matters: over the last few decades, the right built a sustained narrative that "mainstream media" scrutiny is asymmetrical, especially after Vietnam, Watergate, and later Iraq-era reporting battles. Chavez is feeding that ecosystem, but she does it with a professional-sounding diagnosis rather than a rage-post. The line works because it leverages a real newsroom tension - skepticism as identity - and turns it into a credibility audit. If your distrust has a predictable map, it stops reading as method and starts reading as ideology.