Quotes About Media

Republicans have built a political ecosphere that thrives on deceit and lies.

Fox News is unique in American media history as serving more like the in-house propaganda arm of a strong-man dictator than operating by the accepted norms of professional journalism.

These days the branding of Fox News as "Fair and Balanced" often seems primarily to serve the purpose of proving that irony is not dead.

But there is a long history within the far right of right-wing media positioning itself as the only true and honest media. To promote a world viewpoint distinct from that shared by the majority, it was critical to assert that everyone else simply didn't have the correct information on which to base decisions. That is a far easier task than accusing most of the country of being crazy.

Broadcast operated under the FCC's fairness doctrine, whose core requirements were that broadcasters cover matters of public importance and that they do so fairly, mostly in the sense that they air competing positions.

The 1987 FCC decision to stop enforcing the fairness doctrine supercharged conservative media into a billion-dollar industry.

Now there was no need to be concerned with offering equal time or performing a news function.

The Republican Party is held aloft by a large, powerful, and ever-growing industry of deceit. The purpose of much of conservative media is to lie to their audience. It is fitting that at the heart of the Trump presidency itself is a lie: Almost every Republican elected official in Washington knows Donald Trump is unfit to be president.

Conservatives have managed to turn the phrase "mainstream media," or "lame stream media," as that noted arbiter of intellectual rigor, Sarah Palin, called it, into a pejorative. But what is mainstream media? It's the journalism that believes in standards, strives to report facts, and has a professional standard to correct errors. It's the news the majority of Americans consume.

those idiots at Breitbart.

The playing ground between "mainstream" media and the conservative alternatives is forever tilted against the side that has standards, because part of those standards is admitting mistakes and correcting them on the record. The result is a disproportionally long catalog of errors in the press with standards because, more often than not, there is little if any pressure within conservative journalism to admit errors, much less correct them.

When the Trump wing of the conservative media isn't simply inventing something out of nothing—the murder "conspiracy" of the DNC staffer Seth Rich is a perfect example—it loves to take one bit of truth and abuse it into a much larger lie.

Stuart Stevens

Rudy Giuliani's

Not many Americans know Myron Magnet or his work, but they know Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Alex Jones, Lou Dobbs, and an endless stream of professional nuts and cranks who roam the internet selling conspiracies, bitterness, grievance, and anger, in search of an argument.

Springsteen and Julianne Phillips were married. The story moved from Patti Scialfa's early career to her current state of bliss and ended with gushings of the "they were clearly meant for each other" variety. Oh yeah, right. Like that marriage would last. I

Sometimes you want to fall on your knees and thank God in heaven for all the poor news reporting that goes on in the world.

Their culture was saturated with messages about killing South Koreans and Americans and references to horrifically gruesome acts, and it seemed as though they spewed those messages back out unthinkingly, perhaps in the same way that young Americans mimic behavior they see in violent movies and video games. There was really no point in holding a discussion about different kinds of love, since they all agreed that the only real love was the love of the motherland.

Today the term is still used to describe journalism

Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle.

If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.

I felt I was slumming, in my own life. My task was to ward off the drivel (I felt I was drowning in drivel)—the jovial claptrap of classmates and teachers, the maddening bromide I heard at home. And the weekly comedy shows festooned with canned laughter, the treacly Hit Parade, the hysterical narratings of baseball games and prize fights—radio, whose racket filled the living room on weekday evenings and much of Saturday and Sunday, was an endless torment.

Uma sociedade torna-se moderna quando uma das suas principais atividades é produzir e consumir imagens, quando as imagens, que influenciam extraordinariamente a determinação das nossas exigências para com a realidade e são elas mesmas um substituto cobiçado da experiência autêntica, passam a ser indispensáveis para a saúde da economia, para a estabilidade da política e para a procura da felicidade privada.

People can turn off not just because a steady diet of images of violence has made them indifferent but because they are afraid.