Robert McChesney Quotes

Remember Donald Trump had about $4 billion worth of free media, and Hillary Clinton has had about $2 billion, and we've had zero. I think it remarkable that we are standing where we are.

Television looked at politicians and saw a bottomless pit of advertising.

It is increasingly difficult to run a campaign of substance in an atmosphere which increasingly focuses on personality.

The elections are run by the same industries that sell toothpaste on television.

We saw recently that Donald Trump has gotten now over $4 billion in free media exposure, Hillary Clinton over $2 billion, and of course I've had almost none.

Campaign ads are the backbone of American democracy if American democracy suffered a gigantic spinal injury.

A telescope will magnify a star a thousand times, but a good press agent can do even better.

We should remember the campaign advertising will be only a smaller portion of the President's total exposure.

Get every candidate to wear a NASCAR racing suit when they go debate; this way we can see how their sponsors really are.

If you look at the newspapers here - the Washington papers - most of the discussion deals with campaign gossip.

As someone who's been covering presidential campaigns since the 1950s, I have no delusions about political reporting. Candidates bargaining access to get the kind of news coverage they want is nothing new.

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

I think the age of the modern media campaign has created a new icon, the celebrity-in-chief. Political elections have become wars fought by candidates with opposing values.

You spend a couple million dollars running for Congress, people get tired of seeing your face.

Advertisers are very wary of ideological media.

The [TV evening] news usually defines the candidate for the public.

In the end, members of the [state] legislature have to have their own organizations, raise their own money and run their own campaigns if they are ... going to win.

Once you give a politician five minutes of free airtime, he’s going to go somewhere else and spend the money he saved at your station.

Television has become the primary precinct of politics.

Politics is television and whoever masters it is likely to win.

Television has supplanted people as the only audience that campaigners are interested in.

Both Obama and Romney are just rolling in PAC money. Plus, they have the super PAC's behind them. They've got multi-millionaires and billionaires just buying 30-second ads. It gives each of them tremendous exposure.

If you're following candidates in a campaign, you get on their plane, and what they're generally doing is they're dividing the cost of that charter flight by the number of reporters they're carrying aboard. In effect, the press is buying them that campaign flight.

Campaigns maybe encourage us to pay attention to attributes that maybe aren't that important in the presidency.

I've been involved in five presidential campaigns, once as national campaign manager for Walter Mondale.