Time & Perspective Quote by Brit Hume

A recession scrambles the story TV likes to tell about itself: more viewers should mean more money. Brit Hume’s line is a neat demolition of that comforting myth, and it’s aimed as much at inside-the-beltway assumptions as at any particular network’s PR. By opening with “Nobody’s profitable,” he frames the moment as industry-wide triage, not partisan drama or a single company’s incompetence. It’s a flattening move: if everyone is bleeding, then the usual blame games get harder to sustain.

The subtext is about the brutal mechanics of media economics. “Advertising dollars are down” signals that audience attention isn’t the currency that keeps the lights on; advertisers’ confidence is. “Expenses are way up” gestures to the hidden costs viewers rarely consider - talent contracts, satellite time, studio operations, newsgathering footprints that don’t shrink just because the economy does. Hume is quietly reminding the audience that news is a high-fixed-cost business wearing a glamour mask.

Then comes the pivot: “belies the situation that you would expect.” That phrasing carries a faint scold. If you assume ratings equal health, you’re thinking like a viewer, not an operator. And the kicker - “ratings are way up everywhere” - lands as both irony and warning. In anxious times, people consume more news, but the market values that attention less. The cultural moment here is recession-era media: a public hungry for certainty, an industry discovering that demand doesn’t guarantee sustainability, and a business model that turns collective worry into a product that still might not pay.