Education Quote by Robert MacNeil

Diplomacy here is framed less as a noble trait than as a learned social technology: something you practice the way you practice not talking with your mouth full. Coming from Robert MacNeil, the longtime broadcast journalist who helped build PBS's The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour into a temple of restraint, the line carries the quiet authority of someone who spent decades translating conflict into usable public language.

The specific intent is practical. MacNeil is defending a craft ethic: you don't blunder into volatile subjects with raw opinion and call it honesty; you cultivate a calibrated approach that lets people stay in the room long enough to hear one another. "You learn" implies apprenticeship, repetition, correction. Diplomacy isn't personality, it's discipline.

The subtext is sharper. By pairing diplomacy with "good manners", MacNeil demystifies it and also mildly scolds the culture. Manners are what adults teach children so communal life doesn't collapse into ego and appetite. He's suggesting that public discourse, and by extension journalism, requires the same grooming. If we need diplomacy, it's because the default setting is impolite: tribal, performative, impatient with nuance.

In context, this reflects an older broadcast-era ideal: the journalist as mediator, not provocateur; questions that pry without preening; tone as a tool of access. It's also a rebuke to the contemporary incentive structure where bluntness reads as authenticity and diplomacy gets dismissed as spin. MacNeil's point is that tact isn't deceit. It's the minimum viable technique for telling hard truths without detonating the conversation.