William Safire Quotes

Because I live and work in Washington, D.C., I have a ringside seat at the world capital of The Persuasive Arts, or, as I like to call it, The Opinions Racket.

The media can make or break an administration.

A dozen press agents working overtime can do terrible things to the human spirit.

The media are obsessed with spin doctors and with portraying them as a bad thing, yet seem addicted to our medicine.

It's not just politicians. Any spokesman for a vested interest is well schooled in how to say what it is they wish to say, which may bear no relation at all to what you've asked them.

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.

Politics is the business of managing perceptions.

In politics there is a lot of spin—a lot of BS. My job is to cut through the BS.

The primary purpose of the media is to mobilize support for the controlling interests.

I know propaganda when I see it, and I can speak with authority on it.

Donald Trump really understood how to float a story, how to float a rumor, how to manipulate the truth.

The hired journalist, I thought, ought to realize that he is partly in the entertainment business and partly in the advertising business - advertising either goods, or a cause, or a government. He just has to make up his mind whom he wants to entertain, and what he wants to advertise.

Bear in mind that we [ with Edward Herman] did not devise the terms "manufacture of consent" and "engineering of consent." We borrowed them from leading figures in the media, public relations industry, and academic scholarship.

Increasingly, people have very little tolerance for anything that smacks of propaganda.

I remain terrified of the capacity of the media, the capacity of spin doctors, here and abroad, particularly the United States media, to perpetuate false lies, perpetuate lies.

The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the 'engineering of consent' by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays.

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.

The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment.

It is part of politics to make things look better than they really are. What is a spin doctor but a serial euphemiser?

Advertising men and politicians are dangerous if they are separated. Together they are diabolical.

I'm a bit of a propagandist.

My level of intervention in the press, trying to control stories, is zero. Subzero.

The military has been determined to control the images of war since Vietnam. They're convinced that they lost the war because of loss of political support back home, because people saw what was going on.

The Internet has made it much more effective and cheaper to spread propaganda.

I start looking for adjectives in news reporting, and if there are too many of them, if they're all sort of repeatedly designed to influence my thinking in a certain way, I start getting concerned. I'm leery of people trying to paint a picture in a certain way.