Leadership Quote by Andrew Card

A politician telling you not to trust newspapers is never just media literacy advice; it is a power move disguised as common sense. In Andrew Card's hands, the line reads like a calm warning, almost paternal, but the subtext is sharper: the press is unreliable, so the safest narrator is the speaker standing in front of you. It invites skepticism, then quietly redirects that skepticism away from government and toward the institutions tasked with scrutinizing it.

Card, best known as a disciplined White House operator rather than a headline-chasing ideologue, embodies a particular species of Washington pragmatism: manage the story, narrow the damage, keep control of the frame. This sentence is an elegant tool for that job. Its strength is its vagueness. "Everything" overreaches so far it becomes unfalsifiable; any accurate reporting can be waved off as the exception that proves the rule. "Newspapers" stands in for journalism broadly, a catch-all for inconvenient facts delivered by someone else.

Context matters because Card operated during an era when trust in mainstream media and trust in government were increasingly at war, especially in post-9/11 politics and the run-up to Iraq. A line like this helps officials survive that conflict by converting accountability into a credibility contest. It doesn't demand you accept a counter-narrative outright; it merely asks you to doubt. Doubt is cheaper than evidence, and in politics, cheaper often wins.