Press Quotes – Reflections on the Role of the Press

"For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day."

Walter Lippmann

"It has long been apparent that many people in the media don't believe you're competent to make your own decisions."

Harry Edson Browne

"While most people in TV, radio, and the press have treated me wonderfully, some of the most important people want to pretend I don't exist."

Harry Edson Browne

"The press is hostile to the idea of liberty. Most people in the press are for big government. Most people think that the solution to anything, whether it's health care problems, education, whatever it is - it's got to be more government."

Harry Browne

"Modern business must have its finger continuously on the public pulse. It must understand the changes in the public mind and be prepared to interpret itself fairly and eloquently to changing opinion."

Edward Bernays

"Some of the smartest people I know actively believe the press … amazing"

Elon Musk

"The Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms."

Samuel Adams

"Nietzsche said the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois , meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life."

Allan Bloom

"When society as a whole is in the grip of anxiety and the accompanying images of illness and death, those images in themselves become a causal factor."

Mattias Desmet

"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

"The drum-fire of propaganda that the Fed is manning the ramparts against the menace of inflation brought about by others is nothing less than a deceptive shell game. The culprit solely responsible for inflation, the Federal Reserve, is continually engaged in raising a hue-and-cry about 'inflation,' for which virtually everyone else in society seems to be responsible. What we are seeing is the old ploy by the robber who starts shouting 'Stop, thief!' and runs down the street pointing ahead at others."

Murray Rothbard

"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

"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

"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