Politics & Power Quote by Roger Mudd

When a journalist like Roger Mudd talks about “written tone” and “spoken tone” changing, he’s pointing to a quiet but seismic shift in political culture: the moment skepticism stops being a private newsroom habit and becomes a public atmosphere. Tone isn’t a decorative flourish here; it’s a diagnostic. The sentence tracks how institutional trust dies in stages, first as a professional instinct (reporters sense the seams in an official story), then as a stylistic adjustment (copy gets sharper, questions get less deferential), and finally as contagion (audiences absorb that doubt and start watching government the way you watch a suspect witness).

Mudd’s intent is less to accuse any one administration than to describe a media feedback loop with real consequences. “Disbelief…spreads” is the key verb. It suggests that credibility isn’t lost only through a single lie, but through repetition and performance: press briefings that feel like theater, evasions that become predictable, the widening gap between what people experience and what officials insist is true. In that context, reporters’ tone hardens not out of cynicism for its own sake, but out of self-protection; credibility becomes their last scarce resource.

The subtext is almost elegiac: once disbelief becomes the default setting, government loses the benefit of the doubt even when it’s right. The press, meanwhile, risks becoming addicted to suspicion as a posture. Mudd captures the paradox of modern political communication: the more aggressively power manages narrative, the more it trains everyone else to stop believing the story.