Time & Perspective Quote by Montel Williams

Nostalgia does a lot of heavy lifting here, but Montel Williams isn’t pining for some golden age of TV as much as he’s pointing at a vanished idea of responsibility. By invoking “a time when the FCC tried,” he frames regulation as an imperfect, maybe even annoying, adult in the room - and the real punchline is that the adult left. The repetition of “a certain amount” is deliberate: it turns citizenship into a quota, implying that what once held the media ecosystem together wasn’t taste or virtue, but minimum standards enforced by policy.

Williams’ subtext lands on scarcity and imbalance. Educational programming, news, and public access aren’t described as the core of television; they’re the vegetables you have to mandate because the market would otherwise serve dessert all day. His triad is telling. “Educational” speaks to children and civic development, “newsworthy” to informed consent in democracy, “public access” to literal participation - not just being an audience but being on the air. Put together, it’s a compact argument that media used to include a lane for the public interest, even if it was narrow.

The context matters: Williams came up in an era when broadcast TV was governed by public-interest expectations, then watched cable and later streaming explode those constraints. He’s not arguing that the FCC made TV great; he’s mourning the disappearance of shared obligations in a fragmented, incentive-driven media economy where “what sells” quietly replaced “what serves.”