"Some of the most important stories don't lend themselves to television treatment"
About this Quote
A veteran of TV’s own culture machine is quietly admitting its limits. When Kurt Loder says, "Some of the most important stories don't lend themselves to television treatment", he’s not dunking on the medium so much as naming its built-in incentives: speed, compression, visuals, and the demand for a clean arc you can hold through a commercial break. Television, even at its best, rewards the legible. It prefers characters over systems, incidents over slow-moving structural harm, climaxes over ambiguity.
The subtext is a rebuke to the idea that exposure equals understanding. TV can broadcast atrocity, scandal, or tragedy in high definition and still fail to convey what matters most: the long prehistory, the competing truths, the bureaucratic friction, the ways power hides in paperwork and policy rather than in a villain’s face. Some stories resist being "treated" because treatment implies adaptation, and adaptation implies reshaping reality into a format that flatters the viewer’s attention span.
Loder’s context matters. As a journalist whose public identity was forged inside television (MTV News, the era when pop culture and hard news started sharing the same oxygen), he saw how narrative packaging can become the message. His line reads like an insider’s corrective to the industry’s faith in its own spotlight: not everything can be made into a segment, and not everything should be. The most consequential stories may be the ones that look boring on camera: incremental corruption, generational poverty, climate drift, institutional neglect. Television can cover them, but it struggles to make them feel real without turning them into something else.
The subtext is a rebuke to the idea that exposure equals understanding. TV can broadcast atrocity, scandal, or tragedy in high definition and still fail to convey what matters most: the long prehistory, the competing truths, the bureaucratic friction, the ways power hides in paperwork and policy rather than in a villain’s face. Some stories resist being "treated" because treatment implies adaptation, and adaptation implies reshaping reality into a format that flatters the viewer’s attention span.
Loder’s context matters. As a journalist whose public identity was forged inside television (MTV News, the era when pop culture and hard news started sharing the same oxygen), he saw how narrative packaging can become the message. His line reads like an insider’s corrective to the industry’s faith in its own spotlight: not everything can be made into a segment, and not everything should be. The most consequential stories may be the ones that look boring on camera: incremental corruption, generational poverty, climate drift, institutional neglect. Television can cover them, but it struggles to make them feel real without turning them into something else.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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