Quotes About Media

Demagoguery is powerfully reduced when it stops getting people elected, and that usually happens because of in-group policing. Similarly, when it isn't profitable for a media outlet to engage in demagoguery, it won't, and that happens when its target market declines to put up with it. Individual demagogues are best stopped by in-group condemnation, and particular strains of demagoguery are generally ended by public shaming.

The other argument [about the Iraq War] was about argument itself. It characterized any argument about policy (whether, in fact, Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction and whether regime change could be effected through an invasion) as unnecessary, dithering, disloyal, and possibly even deliberately evil, since the correct course of action was so obvious. Major media outlets demonized dissent. In a democracy.

I'm the anchor on the 5 and 11 o'clock news on channel—" "I don't care if you're the anchor on a boat. You

What do we do with those that can be accessed and dismissed by a channel changer, that we love no less than a nineteenth-century poet or an admired stranger or a character from the pen of Emily Brontë? What do we do when one of them commingles with our own sense of self, only to be transferred into a finite space within an on-demand portal?

Music television is all about the media-oriented version of what it is to be a rock star; it's not about what Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix were about - which included great images, sure, but they had spiritual and political and revolutionary content, too.

But when Samuel Berkovic finally found the answer to the question of what had actually caused the problem, no one noticed. Not a single newspaper, magazine, or radio or television program carried the story.

That like the pigs, we all have our heads in the trough. While the hogs don't believe in God, the American dream, or the pen being mightier than the sword, they do believe in the feed in the same desperate way we believe in the Sunday paper, the Bible, black urban radio, and hot sauce. On

The wretched of the Earth, he calls us. People too poor to afford cable and too stupid to know that they aren't missing anything.

Politics is show business for ugly people.

Our selectivity in who to care about makes a difference. About twenty years ago, Walter Isaacson expressed his frustration over the American public's focus on the crisis in Somalia and relative disregard of the (objectively greater) tragedy in the Sudan, when he plaintively asked: "Will the world end up rescuing Somalia while ignoring the Sudan mainly because the former proves more photogenic?" Before

Television to brainwash us all and Internet to eliminate any last resistance.

They are the people who currently dominate the media. An identity of being 'on the left' has become a lazy way of feeling morally superior;

By stirring up hatred on social media. Wow, maybe she's working for the Russians

A "conspiracy theory" no longer means an event explained by a conspiracy. Instead it now means any explanation or even a fact that is out of step with the government's explanation and that of its media pimps.

neoconservatives. In the process of editing these

Patience is not a hallmark of the press, especially in the Internet age of rapid fire news reports. The media hungrily gobble content as long as they can make the case that it is new and interesting to the public. Unpublished reports, speculations, preliminary review process sometimes become as newsworthy as meticulously verified conclusions.

During the Year of the Monkey, the press, which had hitherto generally supported the war or stuck to feel-good stories of heroism and mateship, vigorously changed its tune. The media reacted to growing middle-class disenchantment with the war: they did not initiate or promote anti-war feeling; they reflected and fed off it.

The partisan press would end to-morrow, but for the narrowness and meanness of readers.

the news is often accurate without being truthful.

Super gun,' can you imagine?" Karl Walter would muse more than two decades later. Shaking his head, he chuckled. "You can't buy that kind of attention, not for $50 million, not for $100 million.

The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

And if the government was stone-deaf, the press was mute. The media are convinced in 1987 that they're doing a great job reporting the AIDS story, and there's no denying they've grasped the horror. But for four years they let the bureaucracies get away with passive genocide

I feel a connection to the work of the Pictures artists. We have a shared interest in common, everyday images and how they shape reality. But I understand this shared interest as something more than media critique. There's an uncanny emptiness lurking beneath the surface of every glossy image. For me, the legacy of the Pictures Generation is a desire to disrupt the surface illusion of reality and to access another dimension.

Sometimes I think that we should send all of the Killer Mediums to Afghanistan because al-Qaeda wouldn't stand a chance.