Wit & Attitude Quote by Roone Arledge

Arledge is catching his colleagues in the act of pretending not to know what an audience is. The line drips with newsroom-class anxiety: sports are mass, noisy, emotional, and therefore suspect in spaces that want to imagine themselves as stewards of Serious Life. When he says “ears go up,” he’s describing the reflexive policing that kicks in the moment broadcast news admits it can be popular on purpose. The profanity-laced “what the hell are you doing” isn’t just indignation; it’s fear that legitimacy is a fragile resource, and that covering the World Series or Ali risks spending it on pleasure.

The subtext is Arledge’s long bet that television wasn’t merely a pipe for facts but a machine for attention. In the 1960s and 70s, he helped fuse sports, personality, and narrative into prime-time spectacle, then carried those instincts into ABC News. So his defense isn’t an apology for “fluff”; it’s a manifesto for the idea that public interest is not a moral failing. Ali matters because he’s not only an athlete but a cultural argument in motion: race, war, bravado, celebrity, American identity. The World Series is civic ritual, a shared calendar event that turns strangers into a temporary we.

Arledge’s provocation is blunt: if journalism refuses to cover what people are “really interested in,” it cedes relevance to entertainers and propagandists. The trick he’s hinting at, and the danger, is that once attention becomes the metric, the newsroom starts chasing interest rather than earning it.