"Let me make the newspapers, and I care not what is preached in the pulpit or what is enacted in Congress"
About this Quote
Phillips is basically daring you to stop worshipping the “official” levers of power and start paying attention to the one that moves the room before anyone votes. “Let me make the newspapers” isn’t a quaint brag about ink and deadlines; it’s a claim about agenda-setting. Control the daily story, and sermons and statutes become downstream effects, forced to answer the version of reality the public has already absorbed with their morning coffee.
The line works because it yanks moral authority (the pulpit) and legal authority (Congress) onto the same chessboard as media authority and then treats them as weaker pieces. Phillips, an abolitionist-era activist, knew that formal institutions were often designed to stall: churches could bless the status quo with pious language, and legislatures could bury justice in procedure. Newspapers, though, could collapse distance and patience. They could circulate eyewitness horror, turn isolated abuses into a shared crisis, and make neutrality socially expensive.
There’s subtextual cynicism in the construction: he doesn’t say “I’ll persuade the press,” he says “make the newspapers,” implying authorship, curation, even manufacturing. It’s a reminder that public opinion isn’t merely discovered; it’s built. In the 19th-century media ecosystem of partisan papers and mass pamphleteering, that wasn’t paranoia, it was strategy.
Phillips is also issuing a warning disguised as confidence: if the press can outrank church and state in shaping belief, then whoever captures it can redirect a nation’s conscience without ever holding office.
The line works because it yanks moral authority (the pulpit) and legal authority (Congress) onto the same chessboard as media authority and then treats them as weaker pieces. Phillips, an abolitionist-era activist, knew that formal institutions were often designed to stall: churches could bless the status quo with pious language, and legislatures could bury justice in procedure. Newspapers, though, could collapse distance and patience. They could circulate eyewitness horror, turn isolated abuses into a shared crisis, and make neutrality socially expensive.
There’s subtextual cynicism in the construction: he doesn’t say “I’ll persuade the press,” he says “make the newspapers,” implying authorship, curation, even manufacturing. It’s a reminder that public opinion isn’t merely discovered; it’s built. In the 19th-century media ecosystem of partisan papers and mass pamphleteering, that wasn’t paranoia, it was strategy.
Phillips is also issuing a warning disguised as confidence: if the press can outrank church and state in shaping belief, then whoever captures it can redirect a nation’s conscience without ever holding office.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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