Leadership Quote by Michael Ignatieff

Ignatieff isn’t just complaining about “the media.” He’s naming a political operating system: a class of actors who live inside the news cycle so completely that reality becomes whatever can be booked, clipped, and replayed. The phrase “absolutely media” is deliberately awkward, like a diagnostic label. It suggests a total conversion of political judgment into PR instinct: not occasionally strategic, but existentially dependent.

“Access is what it’s all about” is the tell. Access sounds neutral, even civic-minded, but in practice it’s a currency traded between politicians and journalists: interviews for friendly framing, leaks for influence, proximity for compliance. When access becomes the goal, principles become negotiable and policy becomes packaging. The public interest is still invoked, but mostly as set dressing for a backstage economy of favors.

His “spin 24 hours a day” line does double work. It mocks the relentlessness of modern comms shops, but it also implies a quiet panic: if you stop spinning, you lose control of the narrative, then you lose donors, caucus confidence, and airtime. That’s why it’s “a problem” in the understated way politicians sometimes admit something corrosive while keeping it deniable. He’s criticizing a system he’s had to inhabit.

The subtext is a warning about democracy’s attention market: when politics optimizes for media velocity, it rewards the quick hit over the hard choice, the viral over the verifiable, and the permanent campaign over actual governing.