Life & Wisdom Quote by Walter Isaacson

Isaacson’s line is a sunny, almost market-faith defense of the “more choices is better” idea, applied to the one arena where choice can curdle into distortion: news. As a writer and institutional insider (from journalism to legacy media leadership), he’s speaking in the language of pluralism and participation. Competition, he suggests, is civic oxygen; it pulls people toward information who might otherwise tune out.

The subtext is more complicated. “More and more people…watching the news” treats attention as a proxy for an informed public, a very cable-era assumption. It quietly accepts the rules of the ratings economy: if rivalry increases viewership, that’s a net good. But the same competitive pressures that expand the audience also incentivize heat over light - urgency, outrage, personality, and ideological branding. When networks compete, they don’t only compete on accuracy; they compete on identity, on whose version of reality feels most emotionally satisfying.

Context matters: Isaacson’s optimism reads like a snapshot of a period when fragmentation still looked like democratization, before the full costs of polarizing niches and algorithmic amplification became impossible to ignore. The sentence is careful, too: “for that matter all the networks in general” widens the claim beyond cable news, nodding to a broader media ecosystem where competition is assumed to drive quality.

It works rhetorically because it’s disarmingly reasonable. Who could oppose “great competition”? The line’s power is also its blind spot: it frames the news as a product category, not a public good with failure modes that markets don’t naturally correct.