Daily Inspiration Quote by Norman Lear

There’s a quiet fury in the phrase “at great, great remove.” Lear isn’t just describing corporate distance; he’s sketching a moral geography. The repetition turns “remove” into something felt in the body: the decision-makers aren’t merely upstairs, they’re practically on another planet. It’s a producer’s way of naming the invisible hand that shapes what the public sees while staying off-camera.

Lear’s intent is to expose how entertainment gets flattened into an instrument. By listing General Electric, News Corp, Viacom, “this giant international corporation,” he builds a montage of power centers that don’t look like artists, writers, or audiences. They look like balance sheets. The syntax matters: “the head of” over and over, like an assembly line of authority. No villains with mustaches, just executives whose primary relationship to storytelling is mediated through “ratings,” the blunt metric that turns culture into a quarterly report.

The subtext is Lear’s long-running argument about television as a civic space. Coming from the man who helped mainstream politically charged sitcoms, this is a lament about how that space gets managed by people insulated from consequence. “International corporation” widens the frame: not just American TV, but globalized media consolidation, where local specificity is a rounding error and controversy is a risk to be priced out.

Lear’s bite is restrained but pointed: the real censorship isn’t a memo banning ideas. It’s remoteness itself, where power is so far from the lived world that the safest, most “rateable” version of reality becomes the only one allowed on air.