Russell Lynes Quotes

Television is a powerful medium that has to be used for something better than sitcoms and police shows. On the other hand, if you don't recognize the forces that play on what people watch and what they don't then you're a fool and you should be in a different business.

I seriously consider television to be the people's medium.

I was raised by television. It was my first cultural window. It was a constant companion.

The power of television - it's so present in our lives, we don't even know how powerful it is.

Nothing is really real unless it “happens” on television…Television has brought an inversion of our consciousness. When we take our eyes off the tube, we see things that are not quite authentic – or rather, which gain authenticity only by their resemblance to how things happen on television

Television is the first truly democratic culture—the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.

The truth of television is that what people see, they believe.

Sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you—and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.

Without television, Richard Nixon would not have a chance. He would not have a prayer of being elected because the press would not let him get through to the people.

That's the power of television. You come into people's homes every week, and that creates a familiarity and a false sense of intimacy.

I think I got my education as a young boy from things I saw on TV.

Movies don't necessarily change culture. I don't know if we know for sure if movies change culture but we know for sure that they reflect culture.

I would like television to produce some itching pills rather than this endless outpouring of tranquilizers.

TV shapes thought as surely as language shapes it.

Black people watch more television than anybody else, which makes it legitimate to talk about television. Its anesthetizing effect has been quite real. But that concern isn't new.

Cinema is mass media, it is both overtly gross and exciting. It is our great mirror of society.

Billy was fascinated by the television. At its most basic level, it occupied his time and shut out the demons of isolation. This was another irony because, for so long, he had shunned the tube for a similar purpose-to prevent it from bombarding his brain with demons of banality. However, each time he turned the machine on, he began to discover a world of assorted delights, as well as gain insight into the insidious manner in which this medium was shaping the mass psyche. If nothing else, he learned there was nothing innocuous about it.

Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. (92)

Television leaves no external scars.

When television is good, nothing - not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers - nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

A first hint of the power of the electronic media to bring disaster directly into living rooms came with the radio broadcast of the explosion of the zeppelin "Hindenburg," in 1937 . . .

Television is the quickest form of recognition in the world.

The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television - but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

We stand or fall by television.

I'm just a journalist. I shine a mirror to the culture. I give the cop-out answer.