Politics & Power Quote by Spiro T. Agnew

A conservative vice president warning about media concentration sounds, on its face, like an ideological curveball. That’s part of the quote’s power: Agnew frames monopoly not as an abstract economic problem but as a democratic emergency, a “trend” that quietly hardens into structure while the public looks elsewhere. The phrasing “should be made aware” is doing political work. It casts citizens as victims of a slow-motion takeover, but it also positions the speaker as the one sounding the alarm, the responsible adult calling attention to a danger ordinary people supposedly can’t see because the very system under critique controls what they see.

The subtext is sharper. “Great public information vehicles” dignifies broadcast networks and major newspapers as civic infrastructure, then accuses them of becoming private choke points. “Fewer and fewer hands” isn’t just about ownership; it’s about gatekeeping and agenda-setting, the ability to define what counts as a scandal, a crisis, or a consensus. Agnew’s rhetoric taps a classic American suspicion of concentrated power, borrowing the moral language of antitrust and applying it to perception itself.

Context matters: this comes from the Nixon era, when Agnew aggressively attacked the press as an unaccountable elite shaping narratives hostile to the administration and to “Middle America.” So the quote carries a double edge. It’s a legitimate anxiety about consolidation and the fragility of pluralism, but it’s also a strategic move to delegitimize critics by painting them as monopolists of opinion. The brilliance, and the danger, is that both readings can be true at once.