Steve Schmidt Quotes

Bush is very clever. When the debate should have been about the deterioration of our cities and the lack of action by government, he sent in his idiot to make an outrageous statement about Murphy Brown.

For most Americans, Friday afternoons are filled with positive anticipation of the weekend. In Washington, it's where government officials dump stories they want to bury. Good news gets dropped on Monday so bureaucrats can talk about it all week.

The bosses of our mass media, press, radio, film and television, succeed in their aim of taking our minds off disaster. Thus, the distraction they offer demands the antidote of maximum concentration on disaster.

The news is staged, anticipated, reported, analyzed until all interest is wrung from it and abandoned for some new novelty.

In order to govern you have to feed the news cycle

How can you govern if you always have to feed the news cycle?

The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain.

The media makes a big deal of small issues.

The media know exactly what they're doing, focusing our attention on Arsenio's hairdo. We need to keep our brains brimming with rubbish. If we didn't, we might think about things.

I've argued that Trump's biggest success in his first 100 days was to keep the Russia story at bay, toss out whatever it takes to push the story back, including those false charges that Obama had his wires tapped.

I think progress is a sort of comfortable disease, and we've got a media that says entertainment and celebrity, which isn't bad in itself but it stops the real issues coming forward.

[Tabloids] could call you a child molester, I suppose, but they just go for the two things they think people are most likely to believe and that will most offend yourself and your popularity. My skin hardened to all that stuff years ago.

Donald Trump is not intimidated by the media, and he's not frightened by them, and in fact he loves toying with them. You know, while they're sitting there wringing their hands and taking things so seriously and it's the end of the world, Trump is laughing and having the greatest time.

The evil that men do lives on the front pages of greedy newspapers, but the good is oft interred apathetically inside.

This is part of the ongoing campaign that is brought to you by the Democrat Party and the media to create doubt. This whole thing is an illusion. They're trying to make you believe - and I think they probably have, if you're looking for a remedy. They're trying to make you believe that this thing could be taken away from Donald Trump, that they're making really great progress, and that they might need only, like, 10 more.

The Democrats are coming along, and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have made it look like, "Hey, we're willing to work with Donald Trump. Hey, we'll help him get what he wants, but it's gotta be what we want." They struck a deal. Chuck and Nancy go out there tell the media, "Hey, we got rid of the wall! Trump's joining us on the DACA kids and we got rid of the wall." They report that; everybody believes it. Everybody believes the first thing that they hear.

Now, one of my beliefs, one of my theorems that I have evolved over the years is that when it comes to Democrats and the media they will always tell us who they fear. And all we have to do to learn that is look at who they're trying to damage and/or destroy.

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.

The real news is bad news.

When a picture can't make it on its own, the producers pull in a 'controversial' message - the way a couple whose marriage is falling apart decide to have a baby.

The media cannot come separate [Donald] Trump from his supporters. Only Trump can do that. They're trying, they're gonna keep trying because they think they can. They did it with [George W.]Bush. They did it with [Mitt] Romney. They did it with [John] McCain. They did it with Bob Dole.

The head-lines which do not head anything they simply replace something but they do not make anything.

The truth is that the newspaper is not a place for information to be given, rather it is just hollow content, or more than that, a provoker of content. If it prints lies about atrocities, real atrocities are the result.

Power will be maintained by the groovy guy or gal who gets the most media coverage for his sleaze. Naturally, his friends in various businesses will do okay, too.

It is like using a smoke screen, the same thing for an individual. The topic here is Islam. If French politicians are no longer talking about Islam, they know they will have to talk about something else, which brings the spotlight on their inefficiency. They will have to talk about domestic social and economic issues and they will have to justify their foreign policy, which is obviously something they need to avoid at all costs.