Quotes About Media

The media tycoon Ted Turner told a newspaper reporter in 2010 that other countries should follow China's lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time. Malthus's

Many of the smartest people and most creative talents are working for the brainwashers, using dazzling images, sex and violence to rob us of our sanity.

Imagine how the last presidential campaign would have turned out if instead of the marketing circus that we were treated to, we were just given a weekly round table discussion between Bush, Gore, and Nader for a couple months running up to the election. No staged rallies, no TV images with flags flowing in the sunset, no pollsters. No marketing. Bush would have been luck to get two percent. (from an interview in Attitude, 2002)

Funny Times is the best little cartoon monthly out there (Interview with Washington City Paper)

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Fox News isn't something you can tune out, like a game show or a cable movie you've seen a dozen times. The colors, the moving logos, the giant fonts, the . . . well . . . the things they actually say. It's like the television equivalent of one of those cymbal-banging monkey toys being duct-taped to your forehead.

Benjamin Franklin]. Not only one of our nation's founding geniuses but a printer and publisher, too... He knew that to form the soul of America, one must control the presses.

But it felt like I knew him in the same way that I know people on television. I knew the name. I watched the show.

In our lifetime those who kill the newsworld hands them stardom and these are the ways on which I was raised. —Morrissey, "The Last of the Famous International Playboys

I am in full agreement with the facts of everything said about me in the newspapers—with the facts, but not with the evaluation.

enormes titulares, sus imágenes explícitas y sus textos excesivamente simplificados noqueaban los sentidos y entraban en la consciencia de las personas sin necesidad del proceso intermedio de la razón, como si la comida fuese disparada al recto sin tener que pasar por la digestión.

Noticia es lo que excite más al mayor número de gente. Lo que les va a impresionar y dejar atontados. Cuanto más atontados, mejor, siempre que haya suficientes»

Once a country accepts censorship of the press and of speech, then nothing can be won without violence. Therefore, so long as you have free speech, protect it. This is the life-and-death issue in this country: do not give up the freedom of the press—of newspapers, books, magazines, television, radios, movies, and every other form of presenting ideas. So long as that's free, a peaceful intellectual turn is possible.

The general policy of the press had been stated by a famous editor five years ago. "There are no objective facts," he had said. "Every report on facts is only somebody's opinion. It is, therefore, useless to write about facts." A

I'm so overexposed, I'm making Paris Hilton look like a recluse.

We have no authoritative figure, no Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow whom we all listen to and trust to sort out contradictory claims. Instead, the media is splintered into a thousand fragments, each with its own version of reality, each claiming the loyalty of a splintered nation.

What I hadn't anticipated was the media's reaction to Trump's sudden embrace of birtherism—the degree to which the line between news and entertainment had become so blurred, and the competition for ratings so fierce, that outlets eagerly lined up to offer a platform for a baseless claim. It was propelled by Fox News, naturally, a network whose power and profits had been built around stoking the same racial fears and resentments that Trump now sought to exploit.

It had been more than a month since Donald Trump had inserted himself into the national political dialogue. My advisors and I had assumed that, having milked it for all it was worth, the media would gradually tire of his obsession with my birth. And yet, like algae in a stagnant pond, the number of stories on his conspiratorial musings proliferated with each passing week.

What I hadn't anticipated was the media's reaction to Trump's sudden embrace of birtherism—the degree to which the line between news and entertainment had become so blurred, and the competition for ratings so fierce, that outlets eagerly lined up to offer a platform for a baseless claim.

Once you became president, people's perceptions of you—even the perceptions of those who knew you best—were inevitably shaped by the media.

Other Arab leaders quickly echoed these sentiments, spurred in part by editorializing from Al Jazeera, the Qatari-controlled media outlet that had become the dominant news source in the region, having built its popularity by fanning the flames of anger and resentment among Arabs with the same algorithmic precision that Fox News deployed so skillfully with conservative white voters in the States.

Not only did Americans tend to be skeptical of oil companies, but BP's CEO, Tony Hayward, was a walking PR disaster—stating in the media that the spill involved a "relatively tiny" amount of oil in "a very big ocean"; arguing in another interview that no one wanted to see the hole plugged more than him because "I'd like my life back"; and generally living up to every stereotype of the arrogant, out-of-touch multinational executive.

how the incrementalism and decorum, the endless positioning for the next election, and the groupthink of cable news panels all conspired to chip away at your best instincts and wear down your independence, until whatever you once believed was utterly lost.

Conservative media outlets portrayed climate change as a job-killing hoax hatched by tree-hugging extremists. Big Oil funneled millions of dollars into a web of think tanks and public relations firms committed to obscuring the facts about climate change.