Power in America today is control of the means of communication.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the importance of communication in wielding power in society.
Theodore White suggests that the ability to control communication channels is a key component of power in contemporary America. This reflects the idea that those who manipulate the flow of information can shape public perception, influence opinions, and ultimately govern society, emphasizing the crucial role of media and communication in politics.
In practice
Use this quote in a speech about media influence in political campaigns.
Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.
I happen to think that American politics is one of the noblest arts of mankind; and I cannot do anything else but write about it.
Politics in America is the binding secular religion.
History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.
To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform.
There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of the American presidential campaign.
But as the arms-control scholar Thomas Schelling once noted, two things are very expensive in international life: promises when they succeed and threats when they fail.
Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.
When I wrote 'The West Wing,' the juice behind it was that in popular culture, our leaders in government are generally portrayed as Machiavellian, or as idiots. I thought, well, how about writing about a group of hyper-competent people?
The public think the politicians don't know or care about their lives; and the politicians feel misunderstood.
Whether it is in the United States or in mainland Europe, written constitutions have one great weakness. That is that they contain the potential to have judges take decisions which should properly be made by democratically elected politicians.
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