D. A. Pennebaker Quotes

The world today is the same as it always was but people know more about what's going on in the world than they used to.

I didn't come east of the Mississippi for the first time in my life until I was 26 years of age, but I knew. I read magazines, I listened to radio, I watched television. I knew there was something out there, and I wanted a part of it.

Exponential growth in access to the Internet, satellite television and radio, cell phones, and P.D.A.'s means that breaking news now reaches virtually every corner of the globe.

In Tehran, the 444 days of the Iran Hostage Crisis was the first world event in which you could literally have live events beamed into your living room. Now, every world event plays out on its own, and as a media event.

Young people are better educated. They grew up in a society which is well connected, well informed. They are able to communicate to one another, to know what is happening.

Readership was high, and very attentive. It was people's only source of knowledge about the world.

Events that get covered in the U.S. one way are not very important elsewhere or are given a completely different slant, and one needs to have a kind of comparative way of thinking in order to arrive at a judgment that is not completely provincial, that doesn't end up ratifying one's own national perspective and hence, one's own national agendas.

The main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia. We turn on the TV and see what blew up in Iraq or we see conditions in Afghanistan.

So long as cameras are there, confirmations will be drawn-out photo opportunities.

Because we know so much more, immediately, about what’s going on all over the world, there is less room to hide.

I got 'The Red White and Blue' out of journalism. It puts you in touch with the world.

When something isn't constantly drummed-up by the media, [people] just don't know about it.

So many Americans, for one reason or another, they watch the news and it doesn't really give them the idea of the world. Or they don't read or travel. They have no idea that America is part of the world and not the world itself.

I've started to really become aware of the world we live in, what's really going on.

Truth is, right now two bombs could drop out of the sky and blow up this house and whatever building you're in and just obliterate Dischord and Pitchfork. And there'll be some people crying, there'll be some slow singing, but for 99% of the world, it won't even affect the fly on their soup. Most of the world never have, or ever will hear of me, Fugazi, or Pitchfork. Right now, someone just got killed in Ukraine. Do you feel any different?

Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.

I have as many good friends in the media as anybody in sports has. It's just that I probably have a hell of a lot more enemies than anybody else.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Walking around a slum in a third world country quickly puts into perspective what really matters in life. It grounds you in a way that you can't experience without getting out of your bubble at home.

Mechanical instruments, potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the deeds of the thug to be broadcast to a million people each day.

With the camera you might even not need the reporters. But, you see, media can't trust you to watch [Barack] Obama without them telling you what you just saw and analyzing it.

I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage. Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.

I know that sometimes you have to reason with yourself and say, "This is just TV" or "This is just a movie," but I think also as an actor it's your job to find it so very important.

I've always thought of myself as a reporter. When people ask why I don't stop writing, I say, 'Look at what's happening in this world. Every day there's something exciting or disturbing to write about.’ With all that's going on, how could I stop?

The Internet is the great equalizer.The technology which emanated from the Silicon Valley of California has more potential to ameliorate social inequality than any development in the history of the world, including the industrial revolution.