Life & Wisdom Quote by Will McDonough

Television’s “wonderful” trick, in McDonough’s phrasing, isn’t art so much as velocity: the power to turn distant events into a shared, nearly simultaneous experience. “Immediate impact” is doing double duty here. It names TV’s core advantage over print and radio - pictures land before analysis does - and it hints at a mild unease about that advantage. Impact is what a fist makes. The sentence flatters television as a civic instrument while quietly admitting it operates on the nervous system first.

McDonough was writing from inside a 20th-century media reality where network broadcasts could still plausibly feel like a national campfire. In that context, “pictures of current events” isn’t neutral description; it’s a theory of authority. If you can show it, you can certify it. The subtext is that television doesn’t merely report the news; it produces the public’s sense of what counts as news by privileging what can be seen, captured, and edited into a narrative on deadline.

The line also carries an implicit bargain: you get immediacy, you surrender depth. TV compresses cause and consequence into a few vivid minutes, and those images don’t just inform; they recruit feeling - urgency, outrage, reassurance. That’s why the word “wonderful” works as both praise and tell. It’s admiration for a medium that can galvanize attention, plus a writer’s awareness that attention is easily commandeered when the picture arrives before the context does.