Noam Chomsky Quotes

It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale.

What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.

The hired journalist, I thought, ought to realize that he is partly in the entertainment business and partly in the advertising business - advertising either goods, or a cause, or a government. He just has to make up his mind whom he wants to entertain, and what he wants to advertise.

As we [with Edward Herman] discuss there [in Manufacturing Consent] and elsewhere, recognition of the importance of "manufacturing consent" has become an ever more central theme in the more free societies.

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

Power in America today is control of the means of communication.

The media can make or break an administration.

The state must not ... let itself be confused by the drivel about so-called "freedom of the press," ... it must make sure of this instrument of popular education, and place it in the service of the state.

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

The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen, and the far spread magazine, rules the country.

A dozen press agents working overtime can do terrible things to the human spirit.

Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event.

Today, the media dictatorship is becoming a substitute to military dictatorship. The big economic groups are using the media and decide who can speak, who the good guy is and who the bad guy is.

The book Manufacturing Consent, which I co-authored with Edward Herman, begins with a description of the structure and institutional setting of the commercial media, and then draws some rather simple-minded conclusions about what we would expect the media product to be, given these (not particularly controversial) conditions.

The media—stenographers to power.

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

That's basically what's going on now: Everything is propaganda.

You have to be down here in the States to realize just how tightly controlled the corporate media is and how much they practise Soviet-style censorship through creative omission.

There's a way in which these guys all think absolutely media, day and night. Access is what it's all about, so they spin 24 hours a day and that's a problem.

The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment.

One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.

The genius of David Petraeus has always been his masterful manipulation of the media.

The media are obsessed with spin doctors and with portraying them as a bad thing, yet seem addicted to our medicine.

My level of intervention in the press, trying to control stories, is zero. Subzero.

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