Mass Media Quotes – Perspectives on Communication and Society

"The problem in the 19th century with information was that we lived in a culture of information scarcity, and so humanity addressed that problem beginning with photography and telegraphy and the - in the 1840s. We tried to solve the problem of overcoming the limitations of space, time, and form."

Neil Postman

"Totalitarian systems have always been maintained primarily by systematic indoctrination and propaganda, injected into the population on a daily basis via mass media (without mass media, it is not possible to generate such long-lasting mass formation as that which gave rise to Stalinism and Nazism). This way, the population is literally kept on the vibrational frequency of the voice of totalitarian leaders."

Mattias Desmet

"Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails."

Neil Postman

"The whole problem with news on television comes down to this: all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on a page of a newspaper. And the world cannot be understood in one page."

Neil Postman

"The current moguls understand that true media power lies not in firing up our outrage, as Hearst did, but in befuddling it or tranquilizing it with new toys. The idea is to render us passive so that they can exercise their power to sell us a bunch of stuff we mostly don't need and mostly don't want."

Richard Warren Schickel

"I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy."

A. J. Liebling

"The "Western media" is the head of a talking snake."

James Morcan

"The people will believe what the media tells them they believe."

George Orwell

"People of a television culture need “plain language” both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some circumstances by law. The Gettysburg Address would probably have been largely incomprehensible to a 1985 audience."

Neil Postman

"For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas, Nevada."

Neil Postman

"A city with one newspaper, or with a morning and an evening paper under one ownership, is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass."

A. J. Liebling

"People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news."

A. J. Liebling

"The three main elements of public relations are practically as old as society: informing people, persuading people, or integrating people with people. Of course, the means and methods of accomplishing these ends have changed as society has changed."

Edward Bernays

"When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision."

Neil Postman

"Nothing could be more misleading than the idea that computer technology introduced the age of information. The printing press began that age, and we have not been free of it since."

Neil Postman

"The mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation."

Walter Lippmann