Politics & Power Quote by Larry King

Larry King’s genius was always in making media power sound like small talk, and this line does exactly that: it’s a flex disguised as an observation. On the surface, he’s marveling at a stampede toward communications degrees. Underneath, he’s pointing to a culture that’s stopped dreaming of building things and started dreaming of being on the screen talking about the things.

The CNN detail is doing heavy lifting. “25,000 applicants” isn’t just a statistic; it’s a punchline about scarcity economics in an attention economy. Five intern jobs becomes a kind of lottery ticket, suggesting that the modern career path isn’t meritocratic so much as gladiatorial: thousands auditioning for proximity to a logo. King’s delivery implies amusement, but the subtext is closer to warning. When the funnel gets that narrow, people don’t just compete harder; they optimize themselves into sameness, chasing whatever they think the gatekeepers want.

Context matters: King came up in an era when broadcasting felt like a stable ladder and a civic institution, not a content churn machine. So his aside lands as both generational astonishment and insider commentary. He’s not blaming students for wanting “communications”; he’s quietly indicting the system that made communications the safe bet, the status symbol, the mainline to relevance. The real point isn’t that everyone wants to communicate. It’s that everyone wants access to the microphone, even when the industry only has five chairs.