Tariq Ramadan Quotes

A political party is dying before our eyes-and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the mainstream media, which is being destroyed by the opposition.

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

The thing that sustains a strong Fox network is the thing that undermines a strong Republican party.

The press has a tendency to focus on what politicians disagree on.

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

People of a certain political view tend to read material of only that point of view … except to cast contempt on the other points of view.

If a political party becomes a sectarian party, that is a problem…. Dividing the country along religious lines is just not worth any possible benefit.

The journalistic traits that are valued on TV and radio talk shows are destructive to democracy.

Television has shortened our political discourse.

The Arab Press is a deeply distorted lens.

The media, famously called the marketplace of ideas, is a failed market when a strong interest faces no like interest to generate competing ideas.

There is a power in our land, irresponsible, corrupt and malicious—‘the press,’ which has created the intense feelings of hostility that has arrayed the two parts of the country against each other, which must be curbed and brought within the just limits of reason and law, before we can have peace in America. We can deal with armies who have a visible and tangible existence, but it will require tact and skill and courage to clip the wings of this public enemy.

As has been the case with almost every new technology, from the telegraph to television, the rise of the Internet fed false expectations that it would create a new, more democratic, interactive politics. But blogging’s harsh, unfettered nature has coarsened politics. The fact that so many bloggers are essentially anonymous allows them to spew rancor, rumor, lies, and obscenities. Increasingly, the ­MSM (mainstream ­media) ­appear by contrast staid, centrist, boring, even responsible. ­Deadlines—­once daily, now without limit in the age of the Internet—­demand a constant stream of stories, diluting the quality and upping the rhetorical ante in the effort to grab ­attention, In an ­ever-­escalating rhetorical spiral, political discussion in the media and the blogosphere becomes harsher, sleazier. At the same time, the stories that stand out are the sensational and polarizing ones rather than the constructive, ­bridge-­building ones. A variation of Gresham’s law applies: Just as bad money drives out the good, bad rhetoric and sleazy politics drive ­out—­or at least eclipse and ­obscure—­the ­good.

The media increase the political nastiness while distancing voters from those clashes. Citizens become spectators. ­Headline-­driven news emphasizes the extremes, the fights, the hysteria, the sensational. Political reporters, trying to appear objective by quoting two opposing sides to almost every story, mostly sharpen the differences, slighting any centrist position.

We are more polarized. And some of that comes from the people and some of that comes from the media.

It is sad that some people in the media like to create stories to sell their media, without any real facts to back up their stories.

Trump's agenda is not polarizing. A majority of Americans voted for it. A majority of Americans are clamoring for it. A majority of Americans are asking the Republicans in Congress to get off their hands and implement it! Trump's agenda is not polarizing except to the establishment and to the Democrats and the media. But it's not polarizing out in the country.

My goal is to try to weaponize the American people, try to weaponize the conservative movement, try to weaponize the underground conservative Hollywood movement, to weaponize as many people in the center-right country to try to rectify a generation-plus long problem that has been absolute media bias, absolute media used by the Democratic Party as a tool to defeat conservatives.

The Salafists are trying to abort the revolution and make it religious, though the revolution started secular. There was not a single Islamic slogan. It was secular men and women, and in fact, they were unified. Now they want to divide the revolution, and religion is a very strong weapon.

The media is not about the arena of ideas. The media is not about persuading. The media is about overcoming the will of the people. The media has joined forces with the Democrat Party, members of the Democrat Party, and the extreme radical left in the United States to advance the extreme radical leftist agenda.

The system happens to be Washington and the way politics works, because whatever it is, it isn't working. It defies common sense. And part and parcel of this, right in the middle of it is the media and their lying and their distorting and their favoritism and their efforts to impugn and destroy people like us who want to stop this mess that's been progressing in a deteriorating way for way too many years.

The perception in the Arab world now is that we are having secularists against Islamists, and that's it. So the secularists are progressive; the Islamists are reactionary, conservative. This perception is wrong.

What I don't like about the way the media portrays religion is that they seem to weaponize it and use it as a tool to divide people.

Obama had the media; Obama had the judiciary; Obama had all kinds of support. At an Obama press conference, typical question, "What enchants you?" I mean, Obama was never challenged seriously by the media.

Most of the media bullshit you about who they are. We don’t. We’re not programming to conservatives, we’re just not eliminating their point of view.