Joe Eszterhas Quotes

Too often, politics is like bad theater. The mass media simplifies stories and personalities into their most basic, digestible and familiar bits. Listeners prefer songs they have heard before, after all.

Politics has become show biz.

I think it's a terrible shame that politics has become show business.

This has always been the way of presidential politics. The president rises above the fray while his surrogates go on the attack. They throw the spears and fling the mud; he sits upon the throne.

The mainstream media has chosen their candidates and their issues, and they're not the same as the GOP's. They are going to be painted as the bad guys.

Politics as battle has given way to politics as spectacle.

Democrats were simply hoping to win some political points by getting their outlandish rhetoric published in the newspapers and heard on the talk shows.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

I think the media loves taking the most absurd clips for a sport that has become congressional politics.

There is a thin line between politics and theatricals.

The days when the words 'Hollywood actor' framed Ronald Reagan like bunny fingers as an ID tag and an implied insult seem far-off and quaint: nearly everybody in politics - candidate, consultant, pundit, and Tea Party crowd extra alike - is an actor now, a shameless ham in a hoked-up reality series that never stops.

Congressional investigations are for the benefit of photographers.

Our national politics has become a competition for images or between images, rather than between ideals.

Sooner or later, presidential campaigns would have professional actors as candidates who could speak the lines.

You have a tendency to mix show with justice....You give a theater show to the press all over the world.

We live in a perpetual campaign world.

Politicians and leaders who see the media as 'the enemy within' divide society into two clashing cultural camps. Populist demagogues benefit from binary oppositions.

I don't think you can understand Trump's relationship to his voters and how he gets away with what he gets away with, without understanding the pact between a lifestyle brand and its consumer base and how that really transformed the global economy in the 1990s.

I've had enough of the blowhards on cable TV and the self-righteous anger I hear from people whose only accomplishment in life is their ability to turn the dial on an AM radio.

The sense of crisis is everything for Trump - even if it's largely invented. His depiction of darkness justifies his candidacy, the need to violently shake the system. His ability to conjure fear is what distinguished him from all those career pols he has vanquished. And it suits his ego.

TV and film are always slipping in political messages, not ones designed to bring us together but to divide us.

So much of what we get on our news debate shows is really people spinning one way or the other, giving their talking points one way or the other.

Trump is kind of fascinating. I wish he was only seen in black-and-white 'cause he's like a character from the 1890s.

They say that politics is show business for ugly people, but as I always crack, what would I know about that? I like a challenge

I don't like my politicians entertaining me and I don't like my entertainers politicianing me.