Amy Waldman Quotes

If deliberate distortion of reality by corporate media could be effectively prosecuted in the United States, the entire industry would be behind bars.

The media are less a window on reality, than a stage on which officials and journalists perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions.

When the truth does not get printed, damage is done.

I feel sad when I realize how much truth is being changed or obscured in the American media.

It is well known that in war, the first casualty is truth - that during any war truth is forsaken for propaganda.

We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, 'What is real?' Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.

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.

It is very dangerous to write the truth in war, and the truth is very dangerous to come by.

What's public is propaganda, what's secret is serious.

Of all newspaper presses, I never heard anyone deny that the American is the worst.... [N]othing is easier than to make the people know only one side of a question; few things are easier than to keep them altogether from the knowledge of any particular affair; and, worse than all, on them [the American people] may easily be practiced the discovery that lies may work their intended effect, before the truth can overtake them. It is hard to tell which is worse; the wide diffusion of things that are not true or the suppression of things that are.

Media manipulation in the U.S. today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany, because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the information we want. That misconception prevents people from even looking for the truth.

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups...So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

We know that reality was a well known liberal bias.

Diplomats lie to journalists, then believe the headlines.

There's so much in the media that's not the truth.

There are things that go public, and everything that comes out is not the truth.

The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies all this is indispensably necessary.

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others.

Every time I crash the Internet, it's like this little drop of truth. Every time I say something that's extremely truthful out loud, it literally breaks the Internet. So what are we getting all of the rest of the time?

At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.

Of course you have a duty to show the disfigurations of society as well as its more agreeable aspects. But if TV in the western world uses its freedom continually to show all that is worst in our society, while the centrally controlled television of the Communist world and the dictatorships show only what is judged advantageous to them and suppress everything else, how are the uncommitted to judge between us? How can they fail to misjudge if they view matters only through a distorted mirror?

Pick the topic you like: the Middle East, international terrorism, Central America, whatever it is - the picture of the world that's presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality. The truth of the matter is buried under edifice after edifice of lies upon lies. It's all been a marvelous success from the point of view in deterring the threat of democracy, achieved under conditions of freedom, which is extremely interesting. It's not like a totalitarian state, where it's done by force. These achievements are under conditions of freedom.

Never had there been such an opportunity for the dissemination of knowledge…. But the obverse is also true. We can have thrust upon us a false picture of reality as distorting as the trick mirrors in a Coney Island funhouse.

It is hard to tell which is worse; the wide diffusion of things that are not true, or the suppression of things that are true.