Politics & Power Quote by Ted Koppel

A journalist’s nightmare is hidden in that breezy verb: glazing. Ted Koppel isn’t warning that people disagree with the news; he’s warning they’ve stopped feeling it. “Glazing eyes all across America” pictures a country not angry or persuaded but anesthetized, the civic equivalent of nodding off mid-sentence. It lands because it’s bodily and unglamorous: not “polarization,” not “misinformation,” just the dull shine of attention slipping away.

Koppel’s intent is less to scold viewers than to indict the ecosystem that produces them. “We’re” matters. He implicates the whole broadcast apparatus - anchors, producers, executives, the incentives that reward velocity and spectacle over understanding. The line reads like a small confession from inside the machine: journalism can become a kind of sedative when it packages catastrophe as nightly programming, when seriousness is smoothed into a familiar cadence and a commercial break.

The subtext is also about saturation. Even accurate reporting can flatten into noise when it arrives as an endless feed of crises with no friction, no stakes the audience can touch, no space to process. Koppel, a figure associated with the gravitas of network news, is registering a cultural shift from appointment viewing to ambient media: information everywhere, attention nowhere.

It works as critique because it’s not moralistic; it’s diagnostic. The metaphor doesn’t accuse the public of being stupid. It suggests they’ve been trained - by repetition, by format, by the comforting ritual of “staying informed” - to confuse exposure with engagement, until democracy starts happening in the background.