Jesse Williams Quotes

I remain terrified of the capacity of the media, the capacity of spin doctors, here and abroad, particularly the United States media, to perpetuate false lies, perpetuate lies.

Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.

Young people don't really study the facts; they watch the skewed MSNBC and get a primarily liberal education.

I've been interested in watching the level of conservative misinformation that circulates through the media.

Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

One of the reasons why I think people have gone from reading mainstream newspapers to the Internet is because they realize they're being lied to.

I also focus on Bush and his administration - who do a lot of lying - and how a right-wing media has allowed them to get away with a lot of stuff that, in a different media environment, they probably wouldn't be able to get away with.

In the corporate-owned media, men dressed like Ronald Reagan and women dressed like Rita Hayworth disseminate grotesque exaggerations and gossip in authoritative tones.

The primitive simplicity of their [the masses'] minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell big ones.

We must not be misled by left-wing incompetent news media that, day after day, feed us a diet of fantasy telling us we are bigots, racists and hate-mongers.

We buy into all kinds of lies that are sold to us from advertising to Fox news or from the Vatican to Goldman Sachs.

Like many people, I became increasingly alarmed during the 2016 campaign and the first year of the Trump administration by the full-on war being waged on the very idea of truth.

The greatest hoax of all of the Trump years is that Donald Trump has convinced one-third of the country not to believe not anything but Sean Hannity and Fox and Trump.

The questions I get invariably focus on Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity. It's no secret Hannity is conservative, and O'Reilly certainly is not a liberal. Beck goes well beyond conservatism to some very strange places.

President Trump not only lies with astonishing temerity and abandon, but those lies connect into equally false narratives that gin up the worst fears and prejudices of his base.

If you listen to the talk shows, which are rabid right-wing, and very interesting, an important fact about the United States, they reach a huge audience. And they're very uniform. So right wing, I don't think you can even find an analog in your, but they reach a mass audience, and their view is that the corporations are liberal. Their appeal to the population is, "the country is run by liberals, they own the corporations, they run the government, they own the media, and they don't care about us ordinary people."

How do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists, then believe what they read.

The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even to murder, with the truth.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

But in the right-wing media, they do have a right-wing bias. And they also have an agenda. So their agenda is: we're an adjunct of the Republican Party, and we're going push that agenda every day, and, as you say, brand these stories that help further the right-wing cause.

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.

If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.

I think 20th century media were about tricking people - and the beauty of the Internet is you can't lie anymore.

Press critics worry that the rise of media polarization threatens the foundation of credible, common information that American politics needs to thrive.

Conservatives don't want to read good, smart books. They mostly want to read Fox and talk radio hosts writing about presidents.