Creativity Quote by Jello Biafra

Spoken like a punk dare, "Don't hate the media, become the media" is less a self-help mantra than a tactical command. Jello Biafra isn’t asking you to make peace with corporate news; he’s calling out the lazy purity of complaining from the sidelines. In punk terms, resentment is cheap. Production is power.

The line lands because it flips a familiar posture - media as enemy, audience as victim - into a challenge: if the message machine is rigged, stop treating it like a weather system and start treating it like a battlefield you can enter. Biafra came up in an era when mainstream outlets painted punk as pathology and dissent as spectacle. His broader work with the Dead Kennedys skewered moral panics, political hypocrisy, and the way TV-friendly narratives flatten real conflict into cartoon villains. The subtext here is: you are already being edited. The only question is whether you accept the edit.

There’s also a warning embedded in the empowerment. Becoming the media doesn’t mean "go viral"; it means learning the ugly mechanics - framing, repetition, distribution, fundraising, credibility - and using them without being used by them. It’s DIY culture as counter-infrastructure: zines, pirate radio, community access TV, now podcasts and livestreams. The quote survives because it anticipates the present: everyone has a channel, and the fight moved from getting access to staying honest once you have it.