Aging & Wisdom Quote by Tabitha Soren

News judgment isn’t just about what happened; it’s about who you’re trying to reach, and what kind of “real” you’re willing to manufacture to get their attention. Tabitha Soren’s line quietly admits a core truth of the MTV News era: format was editorial policy. If an event touched young people - meaning MTV’s youth market, not some abstract civic category - the story became more likely to earn the full apparatus of television: a camera, a field crew, an on-the-scene presence that signals importance before a word is spoken.

The subtext is bracingly pragmatic. “Go cover it with a television camera” isn’t framed as a higher journalistic calling; it’s an operational choice about impact. Being there, visually, doesn’t merely document youth culture, it legitimizes it. A story read on air can be informative, even responsible, but it can’t confer the same status as images: crowds, fashion, faces, emotion. MTV’s camera didn’t just report on young people; it translated them into a product that the network could recognize and sell.

Context matters: Soren came up when cable was reorganizing the news hierarchy, blending reportage with the logic of playlists and branding. Her candid distinction between writing and filming exposes the hidden gatekeeping of “breaking news.” For MTV, urgency wasn’t only about events moving fast; it was about the audience being worth mobilizing the spectacle. That’s not cynical so much as clarifying: the camera is an allocation of power.