Ronald Reagan Quotes

A lot of the stories are internal. They leak it to me wanting to get attention, wanting to get that headline. More times than not, I will not give it to them.

First OSP [Office of Special Plans] supplies false or exaggerated intelligence; then members of the WHIG leak it to friendly reporters, complete with prepackaged vivid imagery; finally, when the story breaks, senior officials point to it as proof and parrot the unnamed quotes they or their colleagues previously supplied.

For governments at war, the media is an instrument of war or an element in war that is to be controlled.

There have been many cases in which stars have come to us first to break the news because they knew the pressure was on. They wanted to have it on the air so that they could give their honest evaluation of the situation.

All governments in all wars have used all the means at their disposal to put their own motives, decisions and actions, and the actions of their military forces, in the best possible light.

The genius of David Petraeus has always been his masterful manipulation of the media.

The reason I hate publicists is because I think if we got rid of them everything would be on equal footing.

We studied Western journalists' reporting methods, fed them story ideas, steered them toward sympathetic interviewees, and supplied them with the revolutionary movement's facts and figures.

I set the propaganda machine in motion. Now we will see what the apparatus will do.

A hit and run propagandist on the Kremlin model.

We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media

Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts.

The ones who are the smartest are the ones who use us. In other words, they understand the relationship between the press and leaders.

Proprietary programming like news can be a great weapon.

Industry people do know when a PR movement plays out. The issue is that it is an insult to our intelligence when those who are doing the PR thing presume that we are not wiser.

I'm focused on leaks that hurt the institution of the president and the president himself. I understand we have to leak things to reporters to help shape policy or try to balloon things or do tests on ideas or people for different jobs. I'm talking about nefarious, unnecessary, backstabbing, palace intrigue-like leaks.

Negativity gets attention and gets clicks.

Lay in the weeds and wait, and when you get your chance to say something, say something good.

I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state... a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one's mind and often misled it.

It's not in the interest of the corporations who own the networks to actually be educating the American people so that are debating the real issues. It's much better to deflect attention away from issues and get into the story of the day.

The whole showmanship is NOT to answer every question.

All noise is waste. So cultivate quietness in your speech, in your thoughts, in your emotions. Speak habitually low. Wait for attention and then you low words will be charged with dynamite.

The Press, Watson, is a most valuable institution, if you only know how to use it.

Once you let the words go, you have no control over how they're printed or what the media does with them. So there's no point in trying to make plans or to control it.

There would be a blaze and a confusion, in which timid men would doubt whether the constitution would be burned to tinder or only illuminated; but that blaze and that confusion would be dear to Mr. Daubney if he could stand as the centre figure, the great pyrotechnist who did it all, red from head to foot with the glare of the squibs with which his own hands were filling all the spaces.