Politics & Power Quote by Robert MacNeil

MacNeil’s line lands like a diagnosis delivered in the calm voice of the evening anchor: we’re not just informed, we’re hooked. Calling viewers “news junkies” is a deliberate provocation from a journalist who helped legitimize televised news as a civic ritual. The sting is in the metaphor. “Fix” recasts the nightly broadcast as a controlled dose, less about understanding the world than managing anxiety about it. The world becomes a substance administered at a set hour, with television as dealer, therapist, and gatekeeper all at once.

The intent isn’t to dunk on curiosity; it’s to question the industrial shaping of that curiosity. Television doesn’t merely report reality - it packages it into narrative beats, visuals, and urgency, training audiences to crave the sensation of being up to date. That craving is profitable. It also flattens complexity into headlines that can be consumed quickly, then replaced tomorrow. The subtext is about dependence: when a medium turns public affairs into a nightly habit, it can quietly redefine citizenship as spectatorship.

Context matters. MacNeil came of age when broadcast news consolidated enormous trust and reach, when “tune in every night” described an actual mass schedule rather than today’s infinite scroll. His warning anticipates a culture where news is less a tool for decision-making than a mood regulator: outrage, reassurance, dread, relief - always in rotation. It’s an early critique of infotainment’s power, delivered from inside the institution that helped build the altar.