Quotes About Media

bear that BBC News or CNN International any longer. They show the same stories over and over.

No one cares about some ex-vice-president or president

Dr. Martin Seligman in his excellent book, Flourish, calls the practice of instantly finding the benefit in adversity "post-traumatic growth," and he backs it up with rather thrilling and extensive research studies. Our society and media are fixated on post-traumatic stress because of the strong bias toward (and financial interest in) tragedy.

We see this repeatedly in the news. We get neat little packaged reports – even on complex issues. We're told who the bad guys are, who the good guys are, who the victims are, who the perpetrators are.

My partner has no use for what passes as journalism these days, particularly on the tube. According to Harry, they spend too much time in deep admiration for politicians who show particular skill in lying, so much so that they have now institutionalized the destruction of public ethics by elevating deceit to a statecraft called "spin." It is no longer the lie that matters but the qualitative fashion in which it is told. We

Accept Hardcore for what it was — something alienated kids created. It taught us to mistrust authority and mass media.

Journalists need experts as badly as experts need journalists.

Internet, a pesar de su poder, no ha conseguido dar muerte a la bestia de la asimetría informativa.

Un reciente estudio académico descubrió que un desastre recibe un máximo del 18 por ciento de ayuda solidaria por cada artículo de 700 palabras en los periódicos, y un máximo del 13 por ciento por cada 60 segundos de cobertura en los noticiarios de televisión.

Los medios de comunicación necesitan a los expertos tanto como los expertos a los medios. Todos los días hay páginas de periódicos e informativos de televisión que llenar, y un experto que aporte una noticia discordante siempre es bienvenido. Juntos, periodistas y expertos son los artífices de gran parte de la sabiduría conven-cional.

Los medios de comunicación necesitan a los expertos tanto como los expertos a los medios.

Quizá resulte triste, pero para nada sorprendente, descubrir que expertos como Snyder son capaces de actuar en beneficio propio hasta el punto de engañar. Pero no pueden engañar solos. Los medios de comunicación necesitan a los expertos tanto como los expertos a los medios.

Between 1995 and 2005, there were on average 60.3 worldwide shark attacks each year, with a high of 79 and a low of 46. There were on average 5.9 fatalities per year, with a high of 11 and a low of 3. In other words, the headlines during the summer of 2001 might just as easily have read "Shark Attacks About Average This Year." But that probably wouldn't have sold many magazines.

que sugiere que el contacto típico de Internet es mentiroso, narcisista o sencillamente tiene una idea muy particular del significado de «media».

The standard explanation of the madness of crowds is ignorance: a mediocre education system has left the populace scientifically illiterate, at the mercy of their cognitive biases, and thus defenseless against airhead celebrities, cable-news gladiators, and other corruptions from popular culture.

Journalists assigned to an issue often cover the coverage, creating the notorious media echo chamber.

We never see a journalist saying to the camera, "I'm reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out"—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billions of smartphones turn most of the world's population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

Outrages cannot become public without media coverage.

I believe that journalists have not given enough thought to the way that media coverage can activate our cognitive biases and distort our understanding.

The press is an availability machine. It serves up anecdotes which feed our impression of what's common in a way that is guaranteed to mislead.

The human mind tends to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which it can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age.1 No matter how small the percentage of violent deaths may be, in absolute numbers there will always be enough of them to fill the evening news, so people's impressions of violence will be disconnected from the actual proportions.

The nature of news is likely to distort people's view of the world because of a mental bug that the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman called the Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind.11

Betteridge's Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word no.

Far from being better informed, heavy newswatchers can become miscalibrated. They worry more about crime, even when rates are falling, and sometimes they part company with reality altogether: