Bill Moyers Quotes

It's hard to believe that in the greatest democracy in the world, we need legislation to prevent the government from writing and paying for the news.

A functional media is as important to democratic freedom as voting.

Freedom of the news media must be subordinated to the overriding needs of Singapore, and to the primacy of purpose of an elected government.

I think it is absolutely essential in a democracy to have competition in the media, a lot of competition, and we seem to be moving away from that.

Our founding fathers could not have foreseen that freedom of the press might eventually be threatened just as much by media consolidation as by government.

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy.

It’s a lot easier and cheaper to have thumbsuckers and pundits on television than it is to have reporters and news bureaus around the world.

The fact that there aren't more restrictions on the media is disgraceful.

I am not against privatisation of the media channels but I stand for a strong regulation and transparency.

In many ways, the media today makes dictatorship impossible. But it also makes democracy intolerable.

We've given people both in print and even more so on TV these enormous doses of Donald Trump because people are consuming enormous doses of Donald Trump. If we had gotten a signal that John Kasich got as big an audience, believe me, you would have seen a lot more of John Kasich so it's complicated who's to blame, the media or the people consuming the media.

The U.S. corporate media, otherwise known as the "free press," is that hollow pillar on which contemporary American democracy rests.

I respect very much the role of the media in our society; I think they can be very, very helpful. They serve as a very useful check, sort of a watchdog over the actions of the government, and I respect that. But there is a competing interest, and that is the ability of prosecutors to get information that may be absolutely essential to assist them in the investigation of illegal wrongdoing. And so you've got these two competing interests. I believe that the current policy at the Department of Justice reflects a careful balancing of those interests.

The ultimate check against government tyranny is an informed electorate who will elect people who believe in limited government. I don't want to embrace the idea we want people to take to the streets with guns. I want people to go to the voting booth and check an out of control government by electing conservatives.

Nationalisation...does not in itself engender greater equality, more jobs in the regions, higher investment or industrial democracy. The public knows this perfectly well, and so do the workers who have suffered from pit closures, steel redundancies and the run-down of the railways. It is idiotic to try to bamboozle them.

Limiting the freedom of news 'just a little bit' is in the same category with the classic example 'a little bit pregnant.

A Republican establishment member in the media would be David Brooks in the New York Times, the so-called conservative columnist. He's basically a moderate. He favors big government if run by the people he thinks are smart. He's not crazy about conservatives.

It's a democracy, and the reason why the conservative movement loses is because it believes that it is elite, that the smartest in its midst who have gone to the right schools and who have worked at the right think tanks and have the right opinions and the right friends can run it for the rest of America. That's why I'm a Tea Party adherent over a Republican or conservative establishment adherent.

The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.

You don't have any vestige of democracy in this country. A report recently came out of Princeton University claiming that, of all the policies that have been made in the last thirty years, 95% of them were in the interest of the rich and had nothing to do with what people wanted - basic services, roads, all of that. They called it an oligarchy.

I don't know if Mika Brzezinski intended to be that honest. She's very worried the president intimidating the media is gonna lead to people believing what the president says instead of what the media says, and it's the media's job to control what people think. She used the word "control." She worries that Donald Trump is acing them on this and her fear is rational, but her philosophy is off course, all wet.

If you were to ask me whether you need a dictatorship to run India, No, you do not. Whether you need a powerful person who believes in concentrating power, No, you do not. If you were to ask me to choose between democratic values and wealth, power, prosperity and fame, I will very easily and without any doubt choose democratic values.

If you will help run our government in the American way, then there will never be any danger of our government running America in the wrong way.

We're not a socialist country, because the socialists believe in government ownership in the means of production, but the fascists believe that the government should have private ownership and the politicians should tell people how to run the businesses. So that's the route we seem to be going.