Politics & Power Quote by David Talbot

Talbot isn’t just accusing the press of getting a story wrong; he’s indicting an institution for mistaking power’s script for truth. The phrase “entire American media apparatus” is deliberately sweeping, a provocation that frames the drug war not as a series of policy choices but as a consensus machine: editors, producers, beat reporters, and pundits amplifying the same assumptions until they harden into common sense. “Bought into” does a lot of work here. It suggests complicity more than deception, implying that the media didn’t merely fail to scrutinize the drug war - it adopted its moral framing, its villains, its optics-friendly raids, its numbers, its language.

The subtext is a familiar post-1970s critique: that the press, especially in moments of public fear, defaults to stenography dressed up as coverage. The drug war offered clean narratives (crackdowns, kingpins, “tough on crime” theatrics) and reliable sources (police departments, federal agencies) whose authority is easy to broadcast and hard to contest on deadline. Critical reporting would have required elevating messier realities: mass incarceration, racialized enforcement, civil liberties erosion, and the political incentives behind “law and order.”

His causal claim - “that’s why it’s gotten out of hand” - assigns the media a catalytic role. Not sole authorship, but essential oxygen. When scrutiny is absent, policy expands by inertia: budgets grow, tactics escalate, and human costs become background noise. Talbot’s intent is to reframe the drug war as a media failure as much as a policy failure, challenging the comforting myth that journalism merely reports history instead of helping make it.