Quotes about media

Some newspapers are fit only to line the bottom of bird cages.

— Spiro T. Agnew

Power without responsibility -- the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.

— Stanley Baldwin

The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters -- there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void. That's why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.

— Jean Baudrillard

It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.

— Walter Benjamin

The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognizes neither pity nor pitilessness.

— John Berger

There's no business like show business.

— Irving Berlin

Society cannot share a common communication system so long as it is split into warring factions.

— Bertolt Brecht

The press and politicians. A delicate relationship. Too close, and danger ensues. Too far apart and democracy itself cannot function without the essential exchange of information. Creative leaks, a discreet lunch, interchange in the Lobby, the art of the unattributable telephone call, late at night.

— Howard Brenton

Media, the plural of mediocrity.

— Jimmy Breslin

Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.

— Robert Bresson

If the sexual revolution has been a medical disaster, socially it has been a catastrophe. Why do the media not report and explore the tragic results of the sexual revolution? Because many are collaborators.

— Patrick Buchanan

I think that in the minds of many, the press is being seen less and less as a neutral observer in the impeachment enterprise and more and more as participants, or even collaborators. [On Media's Participation In Watergate]

— Patrick Buchanan

The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.

— Samuel Butler

A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.

— Albert Camus

We've uncovered some embarrassing ancestors in the not-too-distant past. Some horse thieves, and some people killed on Saturday nights. One of my relatives, unfortunately, was even in the newspaper business.

— Jimmy Carter

The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly. News reports, information, statistics, and surveys are everywhere.

— Michel De Certeau

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control -- indoctrination, we might say -- exercised through the mass media.

— Noam Chomsky

The very hirelings of the press, whose trade it is to buoy up the spirits of the people. have uttered falsehoods so long, they have played off so many tricks, that their budget seems, at last, to be quite empty.

— William Cobbett

It is a misfortune that necessity has induced men to accord greater license to this formidable engine, in order to obtain liberty, than can be borne with less important objects in view; for the press, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.

— James F. Cooper

Wooing the press is an exercise roughly akin to picnicking with a tiger. You might enjoy the meal, but the tiger always eats last.

— Maureen Dowd

If Thomas Edison invented electric light today, Dan Rather would report it on CBS News as, Candle making industry threatened.

— Newt Gingrich

The world is for thousands a freak show; the images flicker past and vanish; the impressions remain flat and unconnected in the soul. Thus they are easily led by the opinions of others, are content to let their impressions be shuffled and rearranged and evaluated differently.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

— Graham Greene

Belief is with them mechanical, voluntary: they believe what they are paid for -- they swear to that which turns to account. Do you suppose, that after years spent in this manner, they have any feeling left answering to the difference between truth and falsehood?

— William Hazlitt

I almost wish I could be more exciting, that I could match what is happening out there to me.

— Whitney Houston

I sometimes compare press officers to riflemen on the Somme -- mowing down wave upon wave of distortion, taking out rank upon rank of supposition, deduction and gossip.

— Bernard Ingham

The liberty of the Press is the Palladium of all the civil, political and religious rights of an Englishman.

— Junius

It is impossible to read the daily press without being diverted from reality. You are full of enthusiasm for the eternal verities -- life is worth living, and then out of sinful curiosity you open a newspaper. You are disillusioned and wrecked.

— Patrick Kavanagh

There is a terrific disadvantage in not having the abrasive quality of the press applied to you daily. Even though we never like it, and even though we wish they didn't write it, and even though we disapprove, there isn't any doubt that we could not do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press.

— John F. Kennedy

The press, that goiter of the world, swells up with the desire for conquest and bursts with the achievements which every day brings. A week has room for the boldest climax of the human drive for expansion.

— Karl Kraus

The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.

— Christopher Lasch

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.

— Walter Lippmann

The press is no substitute for institutions. It is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone. They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions. It is only when they work by a steady light of their own, that the press, when it is turned upon them, reveals a situation intelligible enough for a popular decision.

— Walter Lippmann

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium -- that is, of any extension of ourselves -- result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.

— Marshall Mcluhan

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

— Marshall Mcluhan

For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.

— Margaret Mead

Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.

— C. Wright Mills

Next Big Thing -- you hear all that crap. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't psyched.

— Chris O'Donnell

If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish into it.

— William A. Orton

Of all the dramatic media, radio is the most visual.

— John Reeves

The men with the muck-rake are often indispensable to the well-being of society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck.

— Theodore Roosevelt

Report me and my cause aright.

— William Shakespeare

If I use the media, even with tricks, to publicize a black youth being shot in the back in Teaneck, New Jersey... then I should be praised for it, and it's more of a comment on them than me that it would take tricks to make them cover the loss of life.

— Rev. Al Sharpton

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. But, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and the war aims and operating plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play. There is no more appalling caricature of freedom of thought. Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to want to think, and this they consider freedom.

— Oswald Spengler

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

— Henry David Thoreau

There are only two forces that can carry light to all the corners of the globe... the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here.

— Mark Twain

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity -- much less dissent.

— Gore Vidal

I can get a better grasp of what is going on in the world from one good Washington dinner party than from all the background information NBC piles on my desk.

— Barbara Walters

On leaf of palm, on sedge-wrought roll; on plastic clay and leather scroll, man wrote his thoughts; the ages passed, and lo! the Press was found at last!

— John Greenleaf Whittier

In old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.

— Oscar Wilde

It's like a play we're watching

— James Dye

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

— Marshall Mcluhan