David Riesman Quotes

There are many causes why a people politically ignorant cannot be roused to action. Perfect political ignorance must be accompanied by indifference to the general interests of society, and thus one of the most powerful motives which can act on the human mind is totally destroyed.

The media can make or break an administration.

The people who didn't vote for [Donald Trump], didn't watch his rallies. They only know what the media said about him.

You have got to convince people, the Drive-By Media, the mainstream media, is never going to support us, and if you continue to define political success as the media supporting us and not supporting a Democrat, you're never gonna be happy, because that's never going to happen. And if that remains your measure of success, then you're gonna get fooled each and every time.

Donald Trump has the media wrapped around his little finger. And this is a contributing factor to why so many people are bothered and upset, because even in the Republican establishment, the media is looked at as a legitimate player in the power arrangement of politics.

Which suggests something about media and war: it's not just that events happen and the media documents and presents them. There is a third element: what the public is ready to accept, what the public wants to know.

Well I think the media has a very powerful influence on almost anything and everything we do because the general public gets their perception of what is going on in things they don't have immediate access to from what they get through the media.

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

We talk about the influence of the media on public opinion. But reality has some influence on public opinion too.

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.

By choice, polls validate the media’s filtered view of the world.

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

It's hard not to look at the road of the media and how the media is a big part of painting a picture for public opinion.

Allegations become facts, and facts become truth in the eyes of the public, whether they are true or not.

It's the media who love statistics.

I never wanted it to get to this point. I had hoped that, by its own course, by the way the media covers politics, people would open their eyes and see who Donald Trump really is. But that, unfortunately, has not happened. The polls in the early states indicate that he's been able to fool a significant number of people into believing that he is something that he is not.

Today enormous effort goes into convincing the American public that we're just consumers of media manipulation and sound-bites and spin doctors. That we care only about ourselves, money, and stuff. That acting out of passion and conviction doesn't make a difference. But all history shows that it does.

Despite romantic fantasies about caring candidates who learn of America in donut shops, most politicians rely on media to teach them what concerns the average person.

When something isn't constantly drummed-up by the media, [people] just don't know about it.

The media is something that affects a lot of people, so you're constantly trying to strike a balance between respecting something and not caring about it.

I don't even think much about politicians. I think about the people in the audience who applaud the politicians. They are your fellow countrymen and they're the ones you live with - that should be who we target for education and enlightenment.

The media is not just the message. The media is a massage. We're constantly being stroked, manipulated, adjusted, realigned, and manoeuvered.

It's all about media culture and people on television, and that feeling comfortable, friendly, or warm toward a candidate [in the elections] is a reason people would emotionally attach themselves to that candidate. I get the mechanics of it, I just hate that it's true.

That's always been the case in America; there's been a big spectrum in how much people are interested in American politics.

To the very limited extent that I have a political consciousness, to some extent I'm a lazy, apolitical sort of guy that just flits around.