Quotes About Media

Journalists are like dogs?when ever anything moves they begin to bark.

Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the "Nation," it's time for all of us to sit up and worry.

The TV channels never ran out of sponsorship for their live telecasts of despair. They never ran out of despair

The sky was thick with TV. If you wore special glasses you could see them spinning through the sky among the bats and homing birds—blondes, wars, famines, football, food shows, coups d'état, hairstyles stiff with hair spray. Designer pectorals. Gliding towards Ayemenem like skydivers. Making patterns in the sky. Wheels. Windmills. Flowers blooming and unblooming.

The era of manufacturing consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news. Soon media newsrooms will drop the pretence, and start hiring theatre directors instead of journalists.

In an unconscious gesture of television-enforced democracy

Why should propaganda be the exclusive preserve of the Western media? Just because they do it better?

Across the world, when governments and the media lavish all their time, attention, funds, research, space, sophistication, and seriousness on war talk and terrorism, then the message that goes out is disturbing and dangerous: If you seek to air and redress a public grievance, violence is more effective than non-violence. Unfortunately, if peaceful change is not given a chance, then violent change becomes inevitable.

In the years to come, when the war became a way of life, there would be books and films and photo exhibitions curated around the theme of Kashmir's grief and loss.

Fiercely competitive TV channels covered the story of the breaking city as "Breaking News." Nobody pointed out the irony.

Reading the papers, it was often hard to tell when people were referring to Viagra (which was competing for second place on the front pages) and when they were talking about the nuclear bomb—"We have superior strength and potency." (This was our minister for defense after Pakistan completed its tests.)

Can starving people go on a hunger strike? And do hunger strikes work when they're not on TV?

To fuel yet another war this time against Iraq by cynically manipulating people's grief, by packaging it for TV specials sponsored by corporations selling detergent and running shoes, is to cheapen and devalue grief, to drain it of meaning. What we are seeing now is a vulgar display of the business of grief, the commerce of grief, the pillaging of even the most private human feelings for political purpose. It is a terrible, violent thing for a State to do to its people.

El cielo estaba relleno de señales de televisión.

written effort … quite brilliant. Savvy, beautiful, and with the sort of overall rhythm that artists of all media should dream of managing

People are tried and convicted in the newspapers and on television before they ever see a courtroom.

And it is that one percent, the heads of large corporations, who control the policies of news media and determine what you and I hear on radio, read in the newspapers, see on television. It is more important for us to think about where the media gets its information.

That may be true, I thought, But they don't have digital cable or Internet access, so really what's the point of being alive? Civilized life, with all its threats and potential dooms, is too much to bear without the respite of three hundred channels. True, Osama bin Laden may very well send nuclear-bomb-filled suitcases on Amtrak trains into Penn Station, but until then: I Love the 80s on VH1.

He saw the article...which was not an expression of ideas, but a bucket of slime emptied in public—an article that did not contain a single fact, not even an invented one, but poured a stream of sneers and adjectives in which nothing was clear except the filthy malice of denouncing without considering proof necessary.

You can show a dozen guys murderin' each other on TV but you can't ever show two people making love. A naked blade is reckoned to be less obscene than a naked woman.

The quiet folks of America, who had played by all the rules and were now sweating in the frog pot, wanted someone who not only didn't care about speaking the King's English or living the rules of high society but openly mocked what the professional finger shakers from the media, academia, Hollywood, and politicians of both parties thought.

Currently, the physical standards of beauty held up in the media as the goal are actually out of reach for 98 percent of the population. 'This is what is beautiful,' we are told. 'Look like this! Try to be this! You will never be able to, but please keep trying because we are making a lot of money out of your continued failed attempts.

T]he real lie that advertising tells is not so much in what it shows, but in what it leaves out.

Our most powerful visions of traditional families derive from images that are still delivered to our homes in countless reruns of 1950s television sitcoms.