4 Vaclav Havel Quotes on Media

Vaclav Havel quotes on media

75. There used to be a time when this country's president could have delivered the same New Year's Address he had given a year before, and nobody would have noticed. Fortunately, that time has passed.

84. Many people hardly ever see a politician as a person anymore. Instead, a politician is a shadow they watch on television, not knowing whether he is speaking impromptu or reading a text written for him by anonymous advisers or experts from a screen hidden behind the cameras. Citizens no longer perceive their politician as a living human being, for they never have and will never see him that way. They see only his image, created for them by TV, radio and newspaper commentators.

85. It also happens, rather often, that politicians do not actually talk to each other but only to one another's shadows as they appear in the media.

86. I have had direct experience of this myself. Often, what the press wrote, or did not write, about a remark I made somewhere proved to be of a far greater consequence than the remark itself. Democratic choice in such cases ceases to be a choice between alternatives people are familiar with, and have personally tried, and becomes a choice between alternatives offered by those who run the media.