Aging & Wisdom Quote by Tabitha Soren

MTV’s most radical move was never the jump cuts or the loud graphics; it was treating “the audience” as a solvable equation. Tabitha Soren’s line reads like a behind-the-scenes shrug, but it’s really a snapshot of a cultural pivot: news redesigned as a product with a target demographic, not a public service with a mixed, unruly citizenry.

The intent is practical, almost managerial. Define the viewer (15 to 30), study their interests, then build a news voice that fits the room. That’s audience respect, in one sense: no condescension, no assumption that young people will tolerate being bored “for their own good.” MTV News, at its best, met youth culture where it lived, translating politics, war, and scandal into a language shaped by music, celebrity, and speed.

The subtext is thornier. Once you “assume” a specific audience, you also decide what doesn’t belong. Research becomes a gatekeeper: if the data says young viewers care about X, the newsroom optimizes for X, and Y quietly falls away. It’s the early logic of today’s algorithmic feeds: not merely reporting events, but curating identity, reinforcing a sense of “people like you” and “stories for you.”

Context matters: Soren is speaking from inside a network that helped define youth culture in the 1990s, when skepticism toward legacy institutions was rising and media fragmentation was accelerating. Her quote captures both the empowerment and the trap of that era’s media revolution: the promise of relevance, and the cost of narrowing the world to what tests well.