Judith Butler Quotes

It is not at all clear how much the media influences public opinion and how much public opinion influences the media.

When you live in America, it's kind of insular - the news coverage that you get - unless you're really smart about it and find more international news coverage.

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.

I think most people aren't really privy to how stories are developed and what stories are - make it to the front page or to the mainstream media, whether it's in print or in broadcast. And I think they'd be shocked and disappointed to see some of the bias that exists in some of the stories that don't get told - or the manner in which they are told.

There's something structurally integrated with foreign coverage. Reporters often default to thinking of their government as the sort of ultimate authority.

Al Jazeera is not a tool of revolution. We do not create revolutions. However, when something of that magnitude happens, we are at the center of the coverage.

How much has it been your experience that Americans follow what happens in the world?

President Obama is not polarizing, but the media sure is.

But by showing us live coverage of every bad thing happening everywhere in the world, cable news makes life seem like it's just an endless string of disasters - when, for most people in most places today, life is fairly good.

I get much more information about the rest of the world from people who are not Americans. You get a distance from America that is useful for a journalist; useful for my perspective on the world.

When I turn on the news in Paris, the way Syria is covered is different from the way it is covered in Washington, D.C., or London. Even in Western society, where we hold all the values of democracy and freedom of speech, as soon as you point a camera in a particular direction, there is an angle - literally and figuratively.

America is not the center of the universe.

People think that there is a country there that these people are only around when they are on CNN. I don't think that's limited to Haiti.

Both of our wars in Iraq were, on American television, largely bloodless.

The world is such a big place, and there's so much that goes on, but a lot of the media really just cover the same thing over and over again.

Every society needs to examine itself in relation to other societies.

Most Americans may not realize that the news they consume is driven in part by the media mantra, 'if it bleeds, it leads.'

He who never leaves his country is full of prejudices.

The media doesn't create narratives, really. They're not that powerful. What they do is they tap into narratives that are already bubbling amongst their viewership or readership.

The press has a tendency to focus on what politicians disagree on.

The [TV evening] news usually defines the candidate for the public.

The image of one country and its people amongst peoples of another country is largely created and sustained by the media.

Television is the medium through which 80 percent of the people see their leaders….They get all their information about their government and their leaders from television.

What images do we see from the rest of the world? We see natural disasters, war, terror. We see refugees, and we see horrible diseases. Right? We see beautiful beaches, cute animals, beautiful nature, cultural rites and stuff. And then we're supposed to make the connection in our head and create a worldview out of this. And how is that possible?

The more I come to know about the outside world's perception of China, the more I feel there are all sorts of misunderstandings, and to a certain extent, people do not get the full picture from the media. A lot of foreigners have few opportunities to visit China, and a lot of Chinese people do not have the chance to go to Europe or to the West.