Robert McChesney Quotes

So paid media is when you buy an ad - typically in a presidential campaign that will be in Iowa, New Hampshire, the early states. It costs some money to make the ad, but the greatest cost is in actually placing the ad on TV.

The [Democratic] party is a bank. It collects money and gives it to TV stations.

The American people have a right to know the source of the money that is being spent. They should be told who is behind the millions of dollars in campaign ads, and they should receive this information before they vote.

Few developments in campaigning have been as vilified and misunderstood as independent expenditure PACs, or, as they are colloquially known, super PACs.

You spend a couple million dollars running for Congress, people get tired of seeing your face.

TV is still the place to grab the most eyeballs.

American politics is money and thirty second spots.

Public [campaign] financing and free television time are the things that will diminish the high influence that money has on politics.

Most important of all the structural reforms, we need to follow through on the recent Congressional effort to discipline the use of money in politics, by setting reasonable limits on campaign spending, limiting and publicizing individual and organizational gifts and channeling much more of the money (including … all general election spending) through the respective party committees rather than through individual candidates’ treasuries.

More money is being spent on our elections, with less disclosure of where that money is coming from, than ever before.

People spend money on negative campaigning because it works.

We have to talk about the way we finance campaigns.

Instead of candidates hiring people, like yours truly, to create campaign media that works on both conscious and subconscious levels to sway the voting public, what if all TV ads were, by law, only allowed to feature the candidate, with, say, the American flag as the backdrop, alone, speaking directly to the camera?

The Koch brothers are spending more money against me than I've been able to raise.

The cost of campaigning has skyrocketed in recent years because of the falloff in TV viewership. With only one-third as many people watching TV as did 20 years ago, politicians have responded by buying three times as many ads, driving the cost of campaigning to levels which only favored candidates can afford.

If you want to run for the United States Senate, you hire a consultant who will do polling for you, who will tell you the kinds of television ads you should run, who will tell you that most of the money you raise has got to go into TV. Raising money, and then putting that money into the hands of consultants, who then put on TV ads - that's more or less what campaigns are about. We've got to change that.

We agree that Citizens United is a very bad decision. We don't believe outspending your opponent is the way to go, since we don't believe we will ever be outspending our opponents!

I'm not against T.V. advertising for campaigns, but we need to emphasize field campaigning much more than we do.

I mean this is a revolution in how campaigns work - more money was spent by super PACs than by either myself or John Faso. So what that means is that if you're a voter in this district you are more likely to have heard from a super PAC than from me or my opponent.

Of course the Liberal Democrats are going to say things to try and get attention - but I don't think the country is paying much attention.

Obama, of course, outspent McCain.

The decision in Citizens United said that money equals speech, a position that I - and a vast majority of Americans, in poll after poll - could not disagree with more.

Both Obama and Romney are just rolling in PAC money. Plus, they have the super PAC's behind them. They've got multi-millionaires and billionaires just buying 30-second ads. It gives each of them tremendous exposure.

You shouldn't have political action committees.

A lot of the Citizens United problem could be solved if we knew where the money came from for all these ads. The companies create these entities with fake names - like 'Citizens for Nice Puppies' - which means that the sources of the money are unaccountable.