Education Quote by Kurt Loder

Loder is doing something sly here: he’s not dunking on television so much as demoting it. “Rely” is the tell. TV isn’t corrupting by default; it’s seductive precisely because it feels sufficient. By pairing “knowledge of music” with “news,” he collapses two supposedly separate domains - pop culture and civic reality - into the same problem: a medium built for flow, not depth.

The line “There’s just more going on” is deceptively plain, almost bored. It’s a veteran media hand’s way of saying that TV’s greatest trick is compression: it turns sprawling scenes into consumable segments, where context becomes optional and attention is the real product. When he calls television “an adjunct,” he’s making a hierarchy argument without sounding like a scold. Adjunct implies dependency: TV can decorate, amplify, tease, but it can’t substitute for the infrastructure of understanding.

The subtext is also generational and professional. Loder came up through print and then became a defining face of MTV News, which gives the critique bite: it’s insider skepticism, not outsider panic. He’s defending the written word less as a romantic artifact than as a technology of accountability. Print forces sequence, evidence, and re-reading; it slows you down enough to notice what’s missing. In an era when TV increasingly packaged politics like entertainment and music like branding, Loder’s insistence reads as a warning: don’t confuse being informed with being updated.