Herbert Irving Schiller Quotes

Politicians are there to try to deal with stuff, but sometimes it's both fortunate and unfortunate that people like us have more... not involvement, but more power in the stuff that we say.

At least in the West, politicians, corporations and media moguls can no longer take for granted their power to control the public discourse - and have it go unchallenged.

We are in a democratic society. It's our job to question.

The American people should be made aware of the trend toward monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of more and more power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands.

The marketing department of any given publishing house has far more power over free expression in America than any government office.

Let us get on with creating the democratic and pluralistic society that we say we are.

The one-two punch of New York media calling up every agency and corporate advertiser, keeping lists of advertisers who stayed on - " i.e., with Bill O'Reilly " - and those who fled, worked. As the publisher of a center-right magazine, this is disturbing. It sets a very bad precedent about the power of advertiser pressure and sends a message as an organization that you can essentially be blackmailed into getting rid of - " no kidding!

Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate.

In democratic republics such as ours, citizens rely on public criticism of ideas and people to determine national policy.

At the end of the day, media is going to say whatever they're going to say.

Our democracy works because the parties air and debate their differences in public.

In the corporate media, there is almost no criticism of corporations or American empire.

Capitalism and people who control the market have a large hand in everything. It doesn't have anything to do with figuring out what the crowd wants to hear. It has to do with the media deciding what they think people want to hear.

I want people to be able to give their voice.

We've been dealing with censorship around multimedia, about multinational companies and the content they create, for a very long time.

This is why universities, and civil society more generally, are so important for a democracy like ours, founded on a genuine idealism that we have a hard time holding on to. They provide a space to question whatever we are doing in the name of things we say we believe in or might believe in.

Every voter has a right to criticise a government and comment on its functioning.

Americans are not getting screwed by the Republican Party. They're getting screwed by the large corporations that bought and own the Republican Party.

I am not running for mayor yet. But if it comes to be true that people cannot voice an opinion unless they have been elected, then we are no longer in a democracy.

The similarity is that concentration of capital influences virtually everything that goes on. It influences the way the media functions, it very powerfully influences how the government works and it of course influences corporate sector elements, like say how Google or Amazon present materials that reach the public.

If in a democratic country nothing can be permanently achieved save through the masses of the people, it will be impossible to establish a higher political life than the people themselves crave.

The handful of corporations that own most of the media outlets have an interest in reflecting establishment views.

All across America news organizations have been devoured by massive corporations, and allegiance to stockholders, the drive for higher share prices, and push for larger dividend returns trumps everything that the grunts in the newsrooms consider their missions.

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

I am more than ever convinced of the dangers to which the free and unbiased exercise of political opinion - the only sure foundation and safeguard of republican government - would be exposed by any further increase of the already overgrown influence of corporate authorities.