Creativity Quote by Tom Scholz

Scholz isn’t trying to sound like a media theorist; he’s doing what rock musicians have always done at their sharpest: translate a gut-level suspicion into a declarative sentence you can shout back at the system. The phrasing matters. “Virtually every” is blunt enough to feel true even if you can nitpick it, and “big corporation” functions like a catch-all villain with an instantly legible motive: protect profit, manage risk, control narrative. The line lands because it channels a common experience of modern media consumption, where you can feel the edges of what’s allowed to be discussed, then watch those edges harden when advertisers, parent companies, or political relationships are in the room.

The subtext is less “journalists are lying” than “the incentive structure is rigged.” Scholz points at ownership as the upstream lever: if the same entities selling you products also own the megaphone, coverage becomes less about informing the public than maintaining a stable climate for business. “They’ve squashed stories” is doing a lot of work: it implies deliberate suppression, not mere bias or error, and invites listeners to read silence as strategy.

Contextually, this sits in a post-Watergate, post-deregulation, increasingly consolidated media landscape, where local papers disappear, networks merge, and cable news becomes both entertainment and brand management. Coming from a musician, it doubles as a defense of outsider truth-telling: if the official channels are compromised, the stage, the song, the fan network become an alternate press.