Skip to main content

Education Quote by Arianna Huffington

"Mainstream media tend to just mouth the conventional wisdom, to see everything through the filter of right and left"

About this Quote

Huffington’s jab lands because it indicts “mainstream media” for a sin that’s less about bias in any one direction than about laziness of imagination. “Mouth the conventional wisdom” is a deliberately physical phrase: journalism as ventriloquism, repeating what power, habit, and peer consensus have already decided is safe to say. The critique isn’t that reporters are secretly coordinating; it’s that the incentives of prestige outlets - access, speed, ratings, and professional risk-aversion - reward echoing the room rather than interrogating it.

The second clause sharpens the knife. Seeing “everything through the filter of right and left” suggests a pair of tinted lenses that flatten reality into a predictable culture-war palette. It’s not just polarization; it’s a framing problem. When every story is forced into partisan coordinates, complexity becomes illegible: policy turns into team sport, human suffering becomes a talking point, and institutions get treated as chess pieces in an ideological match. The subtext is that this binary doesn’t merely describe politics; it manufactures it by training audiences to interpret events as identity signals.

Context matters: Huffington built her brand by straddling commentary, aggregation, and insurgent media entrepreneurship, positioning herself as an alternative to old gatekeepers. The line doubles as a market argument. If legacy outlets can’t escape stale scripts, there’s room - culturally and commercially - for platforms that promise different angles, different voices, and a break from the “conventional.” Whether new media actually delivers that is the uncomfortable question the quote leaves hanging.

Quote Details

TopicTruth
SourceHelp us find the source
Cite

Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Huffington, Arianna. (2026, January 15). Mainstream media tend to just mouth the conventional wisdom, to see everything through the filter of right and left. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/mainstream-media-tend-to-just-mouth-the-140258/

Chicago Style
Huffington, Arianna. "Mainstream media tend to just mouth the conventional wisdom, to see everything through the filter of right and left." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/mainstream-media-tend-to-just-mouth-the-140258/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Mainstream media tend to just mouth the conventional wisdom, to see everything through the filter of right and left." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/mainstream-media-tend-to-just-mouth-the-140258/. Accessed 6 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by Arianna Add to List
Mainstream Media and Conventional Wisdom by Arianna Huffington
Click to enlarge Portrait | Landscape

About the Author

USA Flag

Arianna Huffington (born July 15, 1950) is a Journalist from USA.

20 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes