Press Quotes – Reflections on the Role of the Press

"Why should freedom of speech and freedom of press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes to be right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns. Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?"

Vladimir Lenin

"I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed."

Neil Postman

"You can tell a good journalist by the fact that he doesn't get mean about a cause, even a good cause."

Hanns Joachim Friedrichs

"The announcement 'This is the First German Television with the Tagesschau' is often the halal to attempted dumbing down of the people."

Volker Bräutigam

"There are always events that are played up in the media and lead to more and more people subscribing to the opinion given from the outside. This in turn leads them to build up beliefs that become a thought prison. If one is stuck in such a politically or medially predetermined thought prison, one begins to identify with it and hardly finds a way out. You have to look for a loophole to break out of this thought prison."

Dr. Jörn Berninger

"There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion."

Winston Churchill

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

Niklas Luhmann

"If you turn off the news and talk to your neighbors, you'll find that our country is far more harmonious than you're being told"

Rob Schneider

"This newspaper is an organ of infamy. It is wrong to read it. Someone who contributes to this newspaper is absolutely unacceptable socially. It would be wrong to be friendly or even polite to one of its editors. One must be as unkind to them as the law will just allow. They are bad people who do wrong."

Max Goldt

"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

""...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

"In the portrayal of political processes, I often see a certain political one-sidedness. For example, when it comes to the topics of ecology or Europeanization, critics are always put in the right-wing corner. [....] The broadcasters adopt government lines in an undifferentiated manner. ARD and ZDF are increasingly acting as an acclamation forum for politics."

Professor Christoph Degenhart

"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 empire still fears the public. If it didn't it wouldn't bother rolling out so much propaganda ahead of all its depraved actions—it would just act. They work so hard to manufacture our consent because they're still afraid of what we'll do to them if we decide we don't consent."

Caitlin Johnstone

"My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content - in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling."

Neil Postman

"The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."

Hunter S. Thompson