Daily Inspiration Quote by Tom Stoppard

“The media” is one of those modern phrases that pretends to be neutral while smuggling in authority. Stoppard’s jab punctures that pretense by making the term sound faintly ridiculous: not a profession, not a set of institutions, but a gathering of mystics in dim lighting, trading whispers and impressions. The joke works because it’s linguistically exact. “Media” is already plural, already abstract, already a kind of fog. Pair it with “convention” and you get the image of a self-organized priesthood; pair it with “spiritualists” and you get the method: vibes, séances, messages from elsewhere.

Stoppard is a dramatist; his native terrain is performance and the mechanics of belief. The subtext isn’t simply “journalists lie.” It’s sharper: “the media” as a category invites a certain kind of credulity, both in the people who invoke it and the people who are supposed to trust it. Spiritualists don’t deal in verifiable facts so much as interpretation, atmosphere, and the persuasive power of a voice claiming access to unseen forces. That maps neatly onto how “the media” often functions in public argument: less a concrete set of accountable actors than an omnipresent spirit you can blame, revere, or fear.

Context matters: Stoppard came up in a Britain where press culture could be both high-minded and tabloid-brutal, and he spent a career watching language launder power. The line is a small comic grenade aimed at institutional mystique - the idea that mediation itself confers truth, when it can just as easily confer theater.