Press Quotes – Reflections on the Role of the Press

"You wish to know my "confidential opinion as to the honesty of the Associated Press." My opinion, not confidential, is that it is the damndest, meanest monopoly on the face of the earth--the wet-nurse for all other monopolies. It lies by day, it lies by night, and it lies for the very lust of lying. Its news-gatherers, I sincerely believe, only obey orders."

James H. Barry

"Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters."

Upton Sinclair

"There are laws to protect the freedom of the press’s speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press."

Mark Twain

"Ready made opinions can be distributed day by day through the press, radio, and so on, again and again, till they reach the nerve cell and implant a fixed pattern in the brain. Consequently, guided public opinion is the result, according to Pavlovian theoreticians, of good propaganda technique, and the polls [are] a verification of the temporary successful action of the Pavlovian machinations on the mind."

Joost A.M. Meerloo

"If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly."

Thomas Sowell

"He who dictates and formulates the words and phrases we use, he who is master of the press and radio, is master of the mind. Repeat mechanically your assumptions and suggestions, diminish the opportunity for communicating dissent and opposition. This is the formula for political conditioning of the masses"

Joost A.M. Meerloo

"The media may constitute the most powerful education system ever known to man."

Fred Fedler

"[...] All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.[...] All media are extensions of some human faculty — psychic or physical. [...] Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change.[...]"

Marshall McLuhan

"The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class."

Walter Lippmann

"The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act."

Walter Lippmann

"News is what someone wants suppressed. Everything else is advertising."

Katharine Graham

"I always tell people. News is the most highly developed form of fiction. The most difficult."

Donald Pleasence

"Give the people a toy to keep them busy long enough, give them 'political parties'! Then they will waste all their energy and wit on meaningless occupation with individuals and other trivialities. So they won't bother us anymore, and we can run our business at will. But to keep the toy from getting boring eventually and the population's discontent from boiling over, a ritual game with a cathartic function as a pressure valve must be inserted at regular intervals. We call it "parliamentary elections," which sounds important. Then there is peace for the next four years, especially since everyone believes they decided something themselves. The media? They play our game all by themselves—without realizing it. Occasionally we give them a morsel when we want to functionally neutralize a somewhat more alert, and thus unwelcome, person or group. Then they are satisfied, and so is the population; after all, they have something to gossip about. By splitting the voters through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energy fighting for battles over issues of no importance."

Montagu Norman

"If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you do read it, you're misinformed [...] One of the effects is the need to be first, not even to be true anymore. So what a responsibility you all have; to tell the truth, not to just be first, but to tell the truth. We live in a society now where it’s just first. Who cares? Get it out there. We don’t care who it hurts, we don’t care who we destroy, we don’t care if it’s true. Just say it, sell it. Just say it, sell it. Anything you practice you'll get good at — including BS."

Denzel Washington

"The very first thing we have to understand is that the mainstream media are not a mirror of reality. Not even a distorted mirror of reality, but provide us with a reality that is constructed according to its very own points of view. Which is made to influence us in a certain way."

Prof. Dr. Michael Meyen

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years......It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supernational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries."

David Rockefelle

"I have spent many years loathing journalism and the intellectual corruption that emanates from it with all the strength of my soul."

Karl Kraus

"Public opinion is influenced by the media and the media are in the hands of those who rule and those who rule favor those who say what is convenient for them and erase everything that does not suit them. So public opinion is, above all, media opinion."

José Luis Sampedro Sáez