Science & Tech Quote by Fred W. Friendly

The sting in Fred W. Friendly's line is that it treats television as a betrayed public trust, not a misunderstood gadget. Calling TV a "national park" isn’t nostalgia; it’s a moral zoning proposal. Parks are protected from extraction. They’re meant to be shared, conserved, and experienced without someone trying to sell you the air. Friendly’s metaphor frames broadcasting as civic infrastructure: a finite, precious commons that should have been insulated from the raw logic of the market.

Then he snaps the leash: "Instead it has become a money machine". The phrasing is deliberately mechanical, stripping away the romance of creativity and replacing it with an apparatus designed to convert attention into profit. That’s the subtext: once the incentive is monetization, content stops being a cultural service and starts being bait. The audience isn’t a public anymore; it’s inventory.

The punchline - "just like pork bellies" - lands because it’s so unpoetic. Pork bellies are the epitome of tradable commodities: standardized, priced, shuffled, and hedged. Friendly is accusing television of undergoing financialization before that word became common in media criticism. TV doesn’t merely chase advertisers; it becomes a market instrument, with programming calibrated like futures contracts for predictable returns.

Context matters: Friendly came up in the era when broadcast networks still carried the rhetoric of public interest obligations, even as commercial pressures hardened. His intent is less to romanticize some pure past than to expose how quickly a medium with democratic potential can be reengineered into a profit engine - and how culture gets flattened when the metric is not meaning, but yield.