Mass Media Quotes – Perspectives on Communication and Society

"It is impossible for me to estimate how many of my early impressions of the world, correct and the opposite, came to me through newspapers. Homicide, adultery, no-hit pitching, and Balkanism were concepts that, left to my own devices, I would have encountered much later in life."

A. J. Liebling

"Sure, the media don't depict reality, they create it! And that's why we need counter-publicity!"

Niklas Luhmann

"The power of radio can be compared only with the power of the atomic bomb."

Paul Felix Lazarsfeld

"In an age in which the media broadcast countless pieces of foolishness, the educated man is defined not by what he knows, but by what he doesn't know."

Nicolás Gómez Dávila

"So long as the media are not entirely monopolized, the individual can play one medium off against another; he can compare them, and hence resist what any one of them puts out. The more genuine competition there is among the media, the more resistance the individual might be able to command. But how much is this now the case? Do people compare reports on public events or policies, playing one medium’s content off against another’s? The answer is: generally no, very few do: We know that people tend strongly to select those media which carry contents with which they already agree. There is a kind of selection of new opinions on the basis of prior opinions. No one seems to search out such counter-statements as may be found in alternative media offerings. Given radio programs and magazines and newspapers often get a rather consistent public, and thus reinforce their messages in the minds of that public. This idea of playing one medium off against another assumes that the media really have varying contents. It assumes genuine competition, which is not widely true. The media display an apparent variety and competition, but on closer view they seem to compete more in terms of variations on a few standardized themes than of clashing issues. The freedom to raise issues effectively seems more and more to be confined to those few interests that have ready and continual access to these media."

Charles Wright Mills

"Very little of what we think we know of the social realities of the world have we found out first-hand. Most of ‘the pictures in our heads’ we have gained from these media—even to the point where we often do not really believe what we see before us until we read about it in the paper or hear about it on the radio. The media not only give us information; they guide our very experiences. Our standards of credulity, our standards of reality, tend to be set by these media rather than by our own fragmentary experience."

Charles Wright Mills

"By now, the Bild newspaper is almost the official government paper."

Heinrich Böll

"If it is not in the media... it did not happen. If it did not happen, but is in the media... we believe it has happened."

Charles T. Tart

"Another century of newspapers and all words will stink."

Friedrich Nietzsche

"Humans are communications junkies. We just can't get enough."

Alan Kay

"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots."

Umberto Eco

""...a drifting apart of public opinion and published opinion when the selection rules of the journalists who have been brought into line largely coincide. This creates a consonance of reporting that acts like a confirmation to the audience (everyone says it, so it has to be right) and installs a stereotype-supported pseudo-environment""

Walter Lippmann

"The leading media as well as the mass media are business models and serve no more to convey "truth" than the pharmaceutical industry serves to promote public health. Indoctrination is part of the essence of media."

Prof. Rainer Mausfeld

"Propaganda is just as effective today as it was 100 years ago. Access to unlimited information has not made the average person smarter."

Unbekannt

"The newspapers are the cemeteries of ideas."

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"The CIA controls everyone of significance in the major media', where it spent about 30% of its budget on covered press personnel and programs"

William Egan Colby

"The masses are never militaristic until their minds are poisoned by propaganda."

Albert Einstein

"They feed you this stuff on TV every day and you think everything's different, right? All the time, right? And it's always the same. I can't take it anymore!"

Lemmy Kilmister