Time & Perspective Quote by Michael Medved

Medved’s line is a neat pivot move: it yanks attention away from the glamorous villain of “the industry” and pins responsibility on the audience, where blame is both more diffuse and more uncomfortable. The intent is corrective, almost scolding. Stop obsessing over how TV gets made, he suggests, and start scrutinizing what habits of attention we’ve normalized and rewarded.

The subtext is a quiet defense of the marketplace as moral weather vane. If consumption patterns are the real problem, then censorship-by-outrage or endless postmortems about network greed miss the point; the viewer’s click, rating, and subscription are the real editorial board. It’s a classic culture-war reframing, but it’s also rhetorically savvy: it converts media criticism from an external critique of power into a self-indictment. You don’t get to be an innocent bystander if your nightly routine is the funding model.

Context matters. Medved came up in an era when Americans argued about “violent” or “indecent” television as if content simply radiated harm outward. His formulation anticipates today’s attention economy, where the consumer is not just a buyer but a data-producing collaborator. “Consumes” is doing heavy lifting: it implies passivity, overindulgence, even diet. Programming becomes junk food; the public becomes complicit in its own malnourishment.

The line works because it’s less a factual claim than a moral provocation. It dares the reader to admit what’s harder than blaming executives: that taste, habit, and appetite are political forces too.