Press Quotes – Reflections on the Role of the Press

"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

"I buy the FAZ on paper - and read NZZ, Spiegel and Bild online before the paywall. But I am just as informed as if I had subscribed to it. When I see the headline and the author, I already know what the text says. I also know who among the authors is currently behind with their alimony payments and therefore has to write in a certain direction."

Harald Schmidt

"The ruling class has the schools and press under its thumb. This enables it to sway the emotions of the masses."

Albert Einstein

"Publicity is the deliberate attempt to manage the public's perception of a subject. The subjects of publicity include people (for example, politicians and performing artists), goods and services, organizations of all kinds, and works of art or entertainment."

Marshall McLuhan

"In regard to propaganda, the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies — the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions."

Aldous Huxley

"Give them a lying newspaper in the morning, let them work a lot during the day for little money and bring the latest manipulated news on TV in the evening, alternating with dumbed-down shows, movies and commercials. Thus they have no more time to think consciously."

Unbekannt

"The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today. It is a great distributor for ideas and opinions. The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation. Because pictures are made to meet market demands, they reflect, emphasize and even exaggerate broad popular tendencies, rather than stimulate new ideas and opinions. The motion picture avails itself only of ideas and facts which are in vogue. As the newspaper seeks to purvey news, it seeks to purvey entertainment."

Edward Bernays

"It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment. Mass media provides the essential link between the individual and the demands of the technological society."

Jacques Ellul

"The fact that there is a gap between journalists and the public is shown above all by the fact that the former are much more interested in the opinion of their colleagues than in the judgment of their readers. Compare this with a healthy system, for example that of restaurants. As we [...] have seen, restaurant owners care about the opinions of their diners, not those of other restaurant owners, which keeps restaurant owners doing what their job is; it prevents the industry as a whole from moving away from diners' interests. In addition, skin in the game creates diversity, and monoculture is prevented. Economic uncertainty exacerbates the situation. Journalists currently work in the most insecure profession imaginable: the majority live hand-to-mouth, and ostracism by colleagues would be fatal. This makes them easy victims for manipulative lobbyists, as has been seen in connection with genetically modified organisms (GMOs), the wars in Syria, and more. In this profession, if you say something unpopular about Brexit, GMOs, or Putin, you're toast. It's the exact opposite of professions where being a follower is punished."

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations."

George Orwell

"At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice."

Gore Vidal

"American journalism is a class institution, serving the rich and spurning the poor."

Upton Sinclair

"In Washington 52 years now I've seen a lot of change but there's one change the dwarfs all the other changes in importance and that is that we no longer have in any real sense a free media and that is big that could not be bigger"

Ray McGovern

"The predominant reason mainstream news reporters say things that aren’t true is because in order to be hired by mainstream news outlets, you need to jack your mind into a power-serving worldview that is not based in truth."

Caitlin Johnstone

"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