Gore Vidal Quotes

The nation whose population depends on the explosively compressed headline service of television news can expect to be exploited by the demagogues and dictators who prey upon the semi-informed.

Today the greatest evil—and therefore the most immediate—is the press.

Younger people who are being indoctrinated into the contemporary system of falsification - they really have to do some research to find out what is the truth. In the general population, people forget or don't care that much. And gradually what you hear drilled into your head everyday comes to be believed. People don't understand what you're talking about any more if you discuss the American war on South Vietnam.

Increasingly, people have very little tolerance for anything that smacks of propaganda.

I think the media spends a lot of time fooling itself.

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.

In politics, a lie unanswered becomes truth within 24 hours.

The press is like a big bass, you just stick a hook in their mouth and they'll take it.

Fair and balanced is doublespeak for bite-out-chunks-of-truth until only irrelevancy is left, byte-sized, entertaining irrelevancy

The expressions of newspapers, like those of orators, could not be accepted without allowance, for they aimed at producing some desired effect, and said either more or less than the truth.

I apologize for what the media has done.

The press ... is but the servant of human intellect and its ministry is for good or evil, according to the character of those who direct it. The press is a mill that grinds all that is put into its hopper. Fill the hopper with poisoned grain and it will grind it to meal, but there is death in the bread.

Those villainous reporters [Stephen] Douglas has with him.

In politics there is a lot of spin—a lot of BS. My job is to cut through the BS.

The primary purpose of the media is to mobilize support for the controlling interests.

We suffer quite as much from exaggerated, hysterical, and untruthful statements in the press as from any wrongdoing by businessmen or politicians.

When people read 'Breitbart' every single day and convince themselves that Barack Obama is a foreign terrorist, that is not a problem of government. That is a problem of community failure, and we have to recognize that.

We're learning a tremendous amount of propaganda from television and the Internet.

Donald Trump really understood how to float a story, how to float a rumor, how to manipulate the truth.

I think the media is a fear-mongering operation. They love to rile their viewership up or to scare them.

I was told that television will be very difficult. But I think everyone just hypes it.

Allegations become facts, and facts become truth in the eyes of the public, whether they are true or not.

You know, the media always tries to twist things and make things into what they're not.

Somehow it did not occur to us that, in a developed democracy, regular media advertising could turn out to be a suspicious and harmful activity.

The danger of censorship in cultural media increases in proportion to the degree to which one approaches the winning of a mass audience.