Mass Media Quotes – Perspectives on Communication and Society

"The press, or at least most of it, has lost the passion, the outrage, and the sense of mission that once drove reporters to defy authority and tell the truth."

Chris Hedges

"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."

A. J. Liebling

"The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved."

Henry B. Adams

"… the media in the United States effectively represents the interests of corporate America, and … the media elite are the watchdogs of what constitutes acceptable ideological messages, the parameters of news and information content, and the general use of media resources."

Peter Phillips

"The biases the media has are much bigger than conservative or liberal. They’re about getting ratings, about making money, about doing stories that are easy to cover."

Al Franken

"The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses."

Malcolm X

"Whoever controls the media, controls the mind, the medium is the message and the message is me"

Jim Morrison

"Imagine the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play."

Joseph Goebbels

"Television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation... Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing."

Neil Postman

"One of the intentions of corporate-controlled media is to instill in people a sense of disempowerment, of immobilization and paralysis. Its outcome is to turn you into good consumers. It is to keep people isolated, to feel that there is no possibility for social change."

David Barsamian

"The media want to maintain their intimate relation to state power. They want to get leaks, they want to get invited to the press conferences. They want to rub shoulders with the Secretary of State, all that kind of business. To do that, you’ve got to play the game, and playing the game means telling their lies, serving as their disinformation apparatus."

Noam Chomsky

"Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your HONOR. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse."

Mark Twain

"The press is our chief ideological weapon"

Nikita Khrushchev

"Following the same course that virtually every other major industry has in the last two decades, a relentless series of mergers and corporate takeovers has consolidated control of the media into the hands of a few corporate behemoths. The result has been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to the American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state."

David McGowan

"In just two sentences, Orwell reveals the institutional structure of the media. He asks: Why is there such censorship? It is partly because the press is owned by wealthy people who want only certain topics to reach the public. And secondly, Orwell says, everyone who goes through the elite education system, attending the "right" schools, learns that there are certain things you must not say and certain thoughts you must not think. This is the role elite institutions play in socialization. Those who do not conform are usually expelled. These two sentences basically say it all."

George Orwell

"Politicians and journalists. These are both categories of people to be approached with the utmost caution: for both range from near-statesmen to near-criminals. And the average remains average."

Helmut Schmidt

"There is less and less free journalism and information. It is only about spreading propaganda that serves an elite"

Novak Djokovic

"Wir leben in einem Zeitalter der Massenverblödung, besonders der medialen Massenverblödung.[....] Wenn Sie sich einmal anschauen, wie einseitig die hiesigen Medien, von TAZ bis Welt, über die Ereignisse in der Ukraine berichten, dann kann man wirklich von einer Desinformation im großen Stil berichten, flankiert von den technischen Möglichkeiten des digitalen Zeitalters, dann kann man nur feststellen, die Globalisierung hat in der Medienwelt zu einer betrüblichen Provinzialisierung geführt."

Peter Scholl-Latour