Mass Media Quotes – Perspectives on Communication and Society

"Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation."

Terence McKenna

"A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth. Take this away and a democracy dies. The fusion of news and entertainment, the rise of a class of celebrity journalists on television who define reporting by their access to the famous and the powerful, the retreat by many readers into the ideological ghettos of the Internet and the ruthless drive by corporations to destroy the traditional news business are leaving us deaf, dumb and blind."

Chris Hedges

"The media propagates a message that corporations want, and there’s a belittling and mocking of the poor and celebration of wealth. A kind of cutthroat, rapacious capitalism is celebrated on reality television shows where you betray and manipulate and push aside your competitors for fleeting fame and money. These are sick values, but they’re disseminated through corporate media in almost every program you watch."

Chris Hedges

"No real journalist makes ? million a year... Those in power fear and dislike real journalists."

Chris Hedges

"He who controls the media controls the minds of the public."

Noam Chomsky

"We are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind."

Edward Bernays

"A single factory, potentially capable of supplying a whole continent with its particular product, cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda, with the vast public in order to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable."

Edward Bernays

"The same people own the media that own the White House that own the Congress that own the oil fields. They all work together to give a false view of the world to the American people."

Gore Vidal

"Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions."

Gore Vidal

"[M]ost of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action."

Neil Postman

"TV serves us most usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse - news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion."

Neil Postman

"We define journalism in America as the business and practice of presenting the news of the day in the interest of economic privilege."

Upton Sinclair

"A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier."

H. L. Mencken

"When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute."

Walter Lippmann

"I could compose and write music and get to share it with the masses and the people around the world and to have them to receive it so beautifully - I love that."

Michael Jackson

"The masses need something that will give them a thrill of horror."

Joseph Goebbels

"Mind control isn't hard to understand. If you do what the TV says, the TV is controlling your mind and you're not. 2 billion people just pushed an experimental medicine under their skin, which was never healthy, simply because the TV told them to. That's mind control."

Unbekannt

"The American press exists for one purpose only, and that is to convince Americans that they are living in the greatest and most envied country in the history of the world. The Press tells the American people how awful every other country is and how wonderful the United States is and how evil communism is and how happy they should be to have freedom to buy seven different sorts of detergent."

Gore Vidal