Quotes About Media

Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas.

In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees.

I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

Algunos analistas de medios de comunicación han advertido que en los informativos de hoy en día no se comprueba nada de nada. Se redacta la noticia y se busca una nueva, afirma un periodista. Otro colega ha opinado, a condición de que no se revele su identidad: Hay que reconocer que era una notición. Si se hubiera comprobado, no habría habido noticia.

for the last fifteen years we have been under the control of an entirely new complex, far more powerful and far more pervasive. I call it the politico-legal-media complex. The PLM. And

Your business is not hardware. Your business is communications. Your business is access to information.

But now reporters came to the story with the lead fixed in their minds; they saw their job as proving what they already knew. They didn't want information so much as evidence of villainy. In this mode, they were openly skeptical of your point of view, since they assumed you were just being evasive. They proceeded from a presumption of universal guilt, in an atmosphere of muted hostility and suspicion.

Used to be - in the old days - the media image roughly corresponded to reality. But now it's all reversed. The media image is the reality, and by comparison day-to-day life seems to lack excitement. So now day-to-day life is false, and the media image is true. Sometimes I look around my living room, and the most real thing in the room is the television. It's bright and vivid, and the rest of my life looks drab. So I turn the damn thing off. That does it every time. Get my life back.

Talking to a reporter these days was like a deadly chess match; you had to think several steps ahead; you had to imagine all the possible ways a reporter might distort your statement. The atmosphere was relentlessly adversarial.

I call it the politico-legal-media complex. The PLM. And it is dedicated to promoting fear in the population—under the guise of promoting safety.

Like a bearded nut in robes on the sidewalk proclaiming the end of the world is near, the media is just doing what makes it feel good, not reporting hard facts. We need to start seeing the media as a bearded nut on the sidewalk, shouting out false fears. It's not sensible to listen to it.

Even though speculation is correct only by chance, which means it is wrong at least 50% of the time, nobody remembers and therefore nobody cares. People do not remember yesterday, let alone last week, or last month. Media exists in the eternal now, this minute, this crisis, this talking head, this column, this speculation.

We mentioned it later to some people who'd been at the Pacification briefing, someone from the Times and someone from the AP, and they both agreed that the kid from the Big Red One had said more about the Hearts-and-Minds programme than they'd heard in over an hour of statistics, but their bureaus couldn't use his story, they wanted ambassador Komer's. And they got it and you got it.

Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it

Trance:Formation of America,) has also been buried by the mainstream media, although they have had little option but to at least run one story that tells us just how vast this network is. The headline was Massive Pedophile Ring Busted; 230 Kids Saved. It was about an Internet pedophile ring with up to 70,000 members. It was one of those subjects the legacy media simply could not avoid, and yet there is no serious follow-through.

Although it sees the world through much the same ideological lens as do corporate and government elites, the press must occasionally report some of the unpleasantness of life, if only to maintain its credibility with a public that is not always willing to buy the far-right line. On those occasions, rightists complain bitterly about a left bias.

But for the most part, the press went about its business of blaming the victims, glorifying the police, and demonizing those who fought back.

In keeping with their system-sustaining function, the major news media present reality as a scatter of events and subjects that ostensibly bear little relation to each other or to a larger set of social relations.

The feeling of being marginalized, a stranger in one's own land, is part of what makes many ethnics so responsive to any kind of media representation, sometimes even a derogatory one. A starving person will eat foul food.

media hosts quickly change the subject, or break for a commercial, or inject an identifying announcement: "We are talking with [whomever]." The purpose is to avoid going any further into a politically forbidden topic, no matter how much the unwelcome comment might seem to need a follow-up query.

them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."*

I must have been in junior high school when a scientist reported (mistakenly, as it turned out) that LSD scrambled your chromosomes; the entire media, as well as my health-ed teacher, made sure we heard all about it.

there are now millions of people who spend more time watching food being cooked on television than they spend actually cooking it themselves.

Most women's magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.