Politics & Power Quote by Karen Black

Karen Black’s line lands like a polite refusal to accept a bad edit of the country. She’s not arguing with a policy or a politician; she’s arguing with an image-making machine. The double “believe” matters: television isn’t just accused of being inaccurate, it’s accused of demanding faith. As if America is something you’re supposed to accept because it’s been broadcast, packaged, and repeated until it feels inevitable.

Coming from an actress, the critique is sneakier than a standard media-bashing rant. Black made her career inside the story factory, which gives the sentence an insider’s sting: she knows how easily performance can get mistaken for reality, how a nation can be reduced to a handful of stock characters, crime-scene crawls, sitcom rhythms, and conflict-as-content. “I’m sorry” reads as both courtesy and condemnation, the kind of softener people use right before they call something a lie.

The subtext is a fight over ownership. If television gets to define America, then America becomes whatever is most legible, most sellable, most reactive - a country curated for attention rather than lived experience. Black’s insistence that “that is” not “is” hints at another America offscreen: messier, quieter, less narratable, more human.

Contextually, it speaks to an era when TV wasn’t just entertainment but the national mirror - and the fear that the mirror doesn’t reflect, it instructs. Her skepticism is basically a demand for media literacy before we had the phrase.