Education Quote by Roone Arledge

Network news once sold itself as an institution: a calm voice, a set of standards, a shared national script. Roone Arledge is calling time on that era with a producer's eye and a strategist's unease. In his phrasing, "current wisdom" lands like a gentle dismissal of a lazy industry consensus: if ABC, CBS, and NBC are all chasing the same footage, the same official statements, the same nightly rhythm, then viewers are really just choosing the face that reads it. The anchor becomes the brand because the journalism has been flattened into sameness.

Arledge's subtext is less about personalities than about power. If the only differentiator is the anchor, the network has already ceded editorial identity. That's a brittle business model: charisma can carry a broadcast, but it can't protect it from fragmentation, scandal, or changing habits. His forward-looking line - "I think that won't be true in the future" - is a warning disguised as a forecast. It anticipates a media landscape where distribution multiplies, audiences splinter, and "the news" stops behaving like a single product. When choices proliferate, the differentiator can't just be who sits behind the desk; it has to be what you cover, how aggressively you report, and what worldview your newsroom signals.

Coming from Arledge, the architect of modern sports spectacle and a major force in ABC News, the comment also doubles as a quiet manifesto: television isn't destiny. It's format. And formats get disrupted.