Daily Inspiration Quote by Don Hewitt

That throwaway-sounding “clicker” line is classic Don Hewitt: a producer talking like a producer, smuggling a whole philosophy of power into a piece of plastic. Hewitt wasn’t praising technology in the abstract; he was clocking who controls the room. The clicker is remote control, channel surfing, the sudden ability for viewers to vanish instantly. For television’s old gatekeepers, attention used to be captive. With the click, it becomes conditional, rented by the second.

The brilliance of the quote is its mismatch between object and impact. “More than any other thing” isn’t hyperbole so much as a threat assessment. The clicker turns mass media into a perpetual audition, where content isn’t competing against “nothing” but against everything else a bored thumb can summon. It collapses patience. It forces pacing, teasing, cliffhangers, and the modern obsession with “hooks.” In that sense, Hewitt is naming the birth of audience sovereignty and, at the same time, its tyranny: creators begin programming not for meaning but for retention.

Coming from the architect of 60 Minutes, the subtext lands harder. That show mastered the post-clicker world by making every segment feel like it might be the one you’d miss if you flipped away. The remote didn’t just change TV; it trained a culture to treat attention as a lever. Today’s infinite scroll is the clicker’s descendant, only now the button is inside your hand all day.