If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable.
Interpretation
This quote critiques the commercialization of media and the prioritization of profit over meaningful content.
Edward R. Murrow's quote reflects on the state of media and society, suggesting that significant and profound events, like a depiction of the Second Coming of Christ, may be rejected in favor of more commercially viable programming. This highlights a tension between spiritual or cultural significance and the capitalist motives that dominate entertainment and media choices today.
In practice
In a discussion about the pressures of commercial media, one might use this quote to illustrate a point about missed opportunities for meaningful programming.
We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles.
Speaking of Sir Winston Churchill: He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.
I don't see any kind of mirror of power, male power, that is, as a form of liberation. I don't believe in an eye for an eye. I don't believe this is truly freedom.
It was hard to reconcile the drumbeats and lifted voices in the night with my memories of flames and the screams of dying men. How could humanity range so effortlessly from the sublime to the savage and back again?
The ultimate enemy of Democracy is not the drug dealer of the crooked politician or the crazed skinhead. The ultimate enemy is the New King that has become so powerful it can murder its own citizens with impunity.
Why, oh why must one grow up, why must one inherit this heavy, numbing responsibility of living an undiscovered life? Out of the nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make something of herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to take a direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how stand still? This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one’s own life.
I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don't like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.
They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.
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