Rush Limbaugh Quotes

The media can make or break an administration.

There is no method by which an average citizen can effectively fight the White House in the media.

And I think after the history of this first term is written and you look back, you're going to see that compared to other administrations or by any other standard you'd want to apply, that it has been an extraordinarily clean, corruption-free administration because the President [Nixon] insists on that.

In any operation as large as that of the federal government there are always going to be anomalies, mistakes and peccadilloes. The trick is to incite so much public (or at least media) outrage about them that the government has eventually to cut its losses rather than risk continued political damage.

Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.

I must be out of it, but I don't know any good journalists who have excused Clinton's problems.

After the 1960s and '70s, there were real doubts about whether a mortal man could handle the country's highest office. It had destroyed Johnson, corrupted Nixon, and overwhelmed Ford and Carter.

The days of the Pentagon Papers debates seem long past, when a sudden transparency yielded insight into fights over war and peace and freedom and security; the transparency afforded by Twitter and Facebook yields insights that extend no further than a lawmaker's boundless narcissism and a culture's pitiless prurience.

Unfortunately, the media, which are not at all reluctant to act in their own self-interest, have succeeded in equating reform in the public mind with further restrictions on just about everyone else's freedom of political speech.

Let me make the newspapers, and I care not what is preached in the pulpit or what is enacted in Congress.

The media cause more problems than they do good.

We know that second terms have historically been marred by hubris and by scandal.

Watergate had become the center of the media's universe, and during the remaining year of my presidency the media tried to force everything else to revolve around it.

The crusades of Vietnam and Watergate seemed like a good idea at the time, even a noble one, not only to the press but perhaps to a majority of Americans.

The power of the periodical press is second only to that of the people.

I covered two presidents, LBJ and Nixon, who could no longer convince, persuade, or govern, once people had decided they had no credibility, but we seem to be more tolerant now of what I think we should not tolerate.

The function of government is to provide you with service; the function of the media is to supply the Vaseline.

I respect the press. The press and the media are a very useful watchdog to check the power of the government.

The newspapers, magazines and other journals of the country, it is safe to say, have shed and continue to shed, more light on the public and business affairs of, the nation than any other instrumentality of public; and since informed public opinion is the most potent of all restraints upon misgovernment, the suppression or abridgment of the publicity afforded by a free press cannot be regarded otherwise than with grave concern.

Burke said there were three estates in Parliament; but in the reporter's gallery yonder, there sat a fourth estate more important far than they all.

With the instrument of radio you can make public opinion. Perhaps even conquer a country.

Acting upon everybody for 30 minutes in 24 hours, the press is asked to create a mystical force called Public Opinion that will take up the slack in public institutions. The press has often mistakenly pretended that it could do just that.

Theodore Roosevelt ... had become uneasy at the effect on the public of the periodical press's increasing criticisms and investigations of business and political abuses

Out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment. And the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the President wants to do even though it's wrong, and the President can be wrong.

Arab media is market driven like the American media. It does not so much shape public opinion as much as it reflects it.