Leadership Quote by Corazon Aquino

Aquino’s line treats “the media” less like a monolith than like an electrical grid: potent when connected, instantly useless when the current stops. The rhetoric is deliberately demystifying. Power is not framed as something the press owns by right, but something it borrows on credit from public consent. That’s a pointed message from a president who rose to power through mass mobilization and civic legitimacy rather than brute force. She’s reminding listeners that institutions don’t float above society; they hang from it.

The subtext is double-edged. On one hand, it’s a pro-democratic warning against media arrogance and elite gatekeeping: if news organizations become detached from ordinary people, they lose the only fuel that matters - trust, attention, participation. On the other, it quietly normalizes the idea that the public can “shut off” the media, as if withdrawal of support is a clean, consumer choice rather than a spectrum that can include intimidation, boycotts, or state-enabled pressure. “Light switch” is the key phrase: it suggests painless, reversible control, a soothing metaphor that can make a dangerous impulse sound tidy.

In context, Aquino is speaking from the Philippines’ recent memory of Marcos-era censorship and propaganda, when media “power” was both weaponized and suppressed. She’s staking out a democratic theory of leverage: the press should be influential, but never untouchable; citizens are the circuit breaker. It works because it collapses abstraction into household reality - and because it asserts a post-authoritarian principle with the confidence of someone who watched crowds, not guns, decide what stayed on.