War & Peace Quote by Roone Arledge

Arledge is naming, with a kind of boardroom candor, the dirty secret of mass news: spikes in civic attention usually arrive disguised as spectacle. Elvis dying and the Son of Sam being captured aren’t just “big stories”; they’re cultural ruptures that pull in the otherwise unreachable viewer, the person who doesn’t tune in for policy fights or incremental developments. He’s not moralizing about the audience’s tastes so much as measuring gravity: what kinds of events can bend the public’s habits, and what does a network do with that brief capture?

The subtext is a strategic one, not a sentimental one. News divisions like to talk about mission; Arledge talks about market share. By framing the choice as “attract new people” versus “fight over the people who do,” he exposes a split inside TV journalism: treat news as a public service with a stable core audience, or treat it as a product that must constantly expand its consumer base. The examples matter because they’re emotionally legible. Celebrity death and serial-killer resolution offer clean narrative arcs, easy entry points, and a sense of communal participation. They’re also hard to replicate without drifting toward sensationalism.

Contextually, this is Arledge the sports-and-events maestro applying event logic to journalism. He helped invent the idea that television doesn’t merely cover culture; it manufactures appointment viewing. The question he leaves hanging is almost accusatory: if the only way to grow is to chase the people who don’t watch news, how quickly does “news” start chasing the things that look least like it?