Media Spectacle Quotes

Who cares about seeing 10,000 helicopter assaults? That's spectacle.

The problem is I think Howie is exactly right, is that Donald Trump would rather be at the center of a media controversy in a negative way than allow the limelight to move to Hillary Clinton and let her actually take heat in the public - in a public arena. And it just sucks up all of the oxygen.

People are trying so hard to become famous. Johnny Marbles, he tried to throw a pie in Rupert Murdoch's face. What do I gotta do, give Sumner Redstone a wedgie?

If you elect a matinee idol mayor, you're going to have a musical comedy administration.

Reality shows serve up juicy drama out of human shortcomings.

Showbiz is just there to give people something to talk about.

The conventions have become meaningless. They’re manufactured events

Meanwhile, politics is about getting a candidate in front of the public as a star, politics as rock'n'roll, politics as a movie.

Politics has become show biz.

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

Unfortunately, we live at a moment in which ignorance appears to be one of the defining features of American political and cultural life. Ignorance has become a form of weaponized refusal to acknowledge the violence of the past, and revels in a culture of media spectacles in which public concerns are translated into private obsessions, consumerism and fatuous entertainment.

American journalists and politicians made a perfect spectacle of themselves in discussing the Abu Ghraib prison controversy.

The idea is to make the script out of a political analysis and then to convey that - sometimes in poetry, sometimes science, sometimes all it takes is a film. The film itself is less and less spectacular because I think very strongly now the more spectacular you are, the more you are absorbed by the things you are trying to destroy.

Television is not the truth! Television is a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troupe of acrobats and story-tellers, singers and dancers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion-tamers and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business!

Only when human sorrows are turned into a toy with glaring colors will baby people become interested - for a while at least. The people are a very fickle baby that must have new toys every day.

When Jerry Springer thinks you've gone too far, my friends, you have gone too far.

We got the bubble headed bleached blonde comes on at five, She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye, It's interesting when people die give us dirty laundry...

In the garden of tabloid delight, there is always a clean towel and another song.

There have always been and there always will be the peripheral sideline activities which are a form of entertainment, which is to say you pay a couple of cents and you see something freakish. That is what reality TV is.

The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.

It's easy to get distracted by the vaudevillian aspects of the healthcare debate.

I was born in '82 and there were these bizarre wars, explained through mass media in ways that made no sense. I remember watching the Gulf War through night vision. That was sold and propagated as a showbusiness moment for the news.

Kim Kardashian's marriage to Kris Humphries famously lasted 72 days, and was reported in the tabloids as being all about the big bucks paid by magazines for the bridal photos: it is a spectacle of a bride-to-be as entrepreneur, not as romantic heroine; the groom, in this scenario, is nothing but a prop.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words.

50 and I are extremely close, so all that social media drama? It's just for the show.