Politics & Power Quote by Sydney Schanberg

New York’s favorite self-portrait is that it’s the cockpit of the country, and Sydney Schanberg’s line both flatters and needles that myth. As a journalist who made his name reporting the Cambodian genocide and later skewering institutional failure back home, Schanberg isn’t offering a tourism slogan. He’s locating a civic habit: in a city where subway poles are plastered with headlines and dinner tables are crowded with immigrants, financiers, activists, and artists, “national issues” aren’t abstract. They’re dinner conversation, workplace stakes, family history.

The telling part is the phrasing: “pay attention” and then the almost defensive add-on, “a huge percentage of people.” That second clause reads like a reporter anticipating skepticism. Americans are routinely described as tuned out, anesthetized by spectacle, trapped in local bubbles. Schanberg’s correction is not romantic; it’s statistical-sounding, street-level. He’s implying that attention is unevenly distributed, and that New York’s density (of media, institutions, crises, and ambition) makes it harder to pretend politics is someone else’s problem.

There’s also a quieter subtext about power. New York houses the megaphones: national newspapers, broadcast studios, publishing, philanthropy, Wall Street. When New Yorkers “pay attention,” that attention can become agenda. Schanberg, who distrusted cozy official narratives, seems to be warning and boasting at once: this city watches, and when it watches, it can move the frame for everyone else.