Justice & Law Quote by Roone Arledge

Television, for Arledge, is both a civic instrument and a trap: an engine capable of enlarging public life, yet structurally biased toward the easiest calories in the pantry. The first sentence is the idealist’s brief - a medium with the reach of a national loudspeaker shouldn’t spend its prime hours recycling laughter tracks and procedural violence. Coming from the man who helped invent modern sports broadcasting at ABC, that critique lands with extra bite: he’s not sneering from the balcony, he’s talking like an architect who knows exactly where the load-bearing beams are.

Then he pivots, hard, into the realist’s warning. Calling you a “fool” isn’t just insult; it’s a professional boundary. Arledge is drawing a line between taste and infrastructure. What “people watch” isn’t simply a referendum on cultural worth, he suggests; it’s a product of incentives: advertisers underwriting mass audiences, ratings systems rewarding habit over risk, affiliates demanding predictability, executives fearing the cost of being wrong. Sitcoms and cop shows aren’t winning because they’re profound; they’re winning because they’re dependable, modular, and exportable - a factory format for attention.

The subtext is a critique of naive reformism. Want “something better”? Fine. But don’t pretend television is a classroom where enlightened programmers can assign homework. It’s a marketplace where emotion, repetition, and scheduling are the hidden curriculum. Arledge’s intent is bracingly pragmatic: if you want to improve the medium, you have to wrestle the machinery that shapes desire, not just scold the audience for having it.