"You've got to keep an open mind"
About this Quote
“Keep an open mind” is the kind of phrase that sounds like a bumper sticker until you hear it in Chris Wallace’s voice: clipped, insistent, aimed less at your soul than at your standards. Coming from a journalist who built a career on high-stakes interviews, it’s not a plea for bland tolerance. It’s a discipline. Wallace’s brand of openness is procedural, not sentimental: show up without a verdict, ask the hard follow-up anyway, and don’t let your audience’s preferences write your questions for you.
The subtext is a warning about intellectual laziness dressed up as certainty. In political media, “open-mindedness” can be caricatured as weakness or false balance. Wallace’s intent pushes in the opposite direction. He’s pointing to a posture that allows facts to land, even when they complicate a clean narrative. That matters in an era where viewers often want interviews to function like prosecutions (for the other side) or pep rallies (for their side). His line quietly rejects both.
Contextually, it fits the Wallace tradition: broadcast journalism as a public test of claims, conducted in real time, under pressure. An open mind here doesn’t mean being endlessly persuadable; it means being correctly skeptical of everyone, including yourself. The phrase works because it’s deceptively simple while smuggling in a tougher ethic: curiosity as accountability, humility as a professional tool, and rigor as the antidote to partisan performance.
The subtext is a warning about intellectual laziness dressed up as certainty. In political media, “open-mindedness” can be caricatured as weakness or false balance. Wallace’s intent pushes in the opposite direction. He’s pointing to a posture that allows facts to land, even when they complicate a clean narrative. That matters in an era where viewers often want interviews to function like prosecutions (for the other side) or pep rallies (for their side). His line quietly rejects both.
Contextually, it fits the Wallace tradition: broadcast journalism as a public test of claims, conducted in real time, under pressure. An open mind here doesn’t mean being endlessly persuadable; it means being correctly skeptical of everyone, including yourself. The phrase works because it’s deceptively simple while smuggling in a tougher ethic: curiosity as accountability, humility as a professional tool, and rigor as the antidote to partisan performance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Improvement |
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