"The fact is that surveys which media people openly admit to show that fewer than twelve percent of their customers believe they're doing a good job, while the average profit margin in television is in the neighborhood of eighty percent"
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A twelve-percent approval rating paired with an eighty-percent profit margin is not a statistic so much as an indictment with numbers attached. L. Neil Smith is doing what polemicists do best: using the cold sheen of data to frame television not as a flawed civic institution but as a wildly successful business that thrives on public distrust. The line “media people openly admit” twists the knife. It implies the damning part isn’t hidden; it’s casually acknowledged inside the industry, which makes the audience’s continued dependence look less like manipulation and more like resignation.
The subtext is libertarian and consumerist: if a product is this disliked, market logic says it should fail. That it doesn’t suggests the market is distorted - by limited choices, by captive attention, by advertising economics that reward reach over respect. Smith collapses the usual “the media is biased” complaint into a sharper charge: the system is indifferent to being believed because belief isn’t the revenue stream. Eyeballs are.
Context matters. Smith, a science-fiction writer with a long-running skepticism toward centralized institutions, is less interested in reforming TV than in delegitimizing it as a cultural authority. The rhetorical move is to separate “customers” from “citizens.” Television might still deliver entertainment, but it forfeits moral standing as an informer when it can post “eighty percent” margins while being widely judged incompetent. The punchline isn’t that people hate TV; it’s that the industry has learned to monetize the hate.
The subtext is libertarian and consumerist: if a product is this disliked, market logic says it should fail. That it doesn’t suggests the market is distorted - by limited choices, by captive attention, by advertising economics that reward reach over respect. Smith collapses the usual “the media is biased” complaint into a sharper charge: the system is indifferent to being believed because belief isn’t the revenue stream. Eyeballs are.
Context matters. Smith, a science-fiction writer with a long-running skepticism toward centralized institutions, is less interested in reforming TV than in delegitimizing it as a cultural authority. The rhetorical move is to separate “customers” from “citizens.” Television might still deliver entertainment, but it forfeits moral standing as an informer when it can post “eighty percent” margins while being widely judged incompetent. The punchline isn’t that people hate TV; it’s that the industry has learned to monetize the hate.
Quote Details
| Topic | Customer Service |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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