Harrison Salisbury Quotes

In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.

One of the obsessions that the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist parties had was always controlling the message - all information that everybody gets has to be carefully controlled and monitored. Art was no exception.

The statues of Lenin and Stalin are down, but the fight against their ghosts seems harder.

We have an open society. No one will come and take me away for saying what I am saying. But they don't have to, if they can control how many people hear it. And that's how they do it.

Because journalists of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty - the former broadcast into Eastern Europe, the latter into the Soviet Union - accurately depicted daily life in communist Europe, in the local languages, using native journalists, millions of people tuned in to them.

Under Lenin, hardly less than under Stalin, historians harbored critical opinions at their peril. The writing, let alone the publication, of political diaries was virtually impossible.

We study, as Americans, the extreme aspects of repression under the Stalinist era. We're focused on them. The vast majority of Russian citizens, it was a much softer type of being disconcerted.

We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial -whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.

We can't have, like, willy-nilly proliferation of fake news. That's crazy. You can't have more types of fake news than real news. That's allowing public deception to go unchecked. That's crazy.

When I entered the film school at the Prague Academy in the '50s, it was the hardest time in the Communist countries. The ideological control of the society was almost absolute.

Under Stalin, artists weren't dissidents; all they hoped was to survive and write.

Proprietary programming like news can be a great weapon.

Resignation was the defining condition of Soviet life.

In their efforts to discredit human freedom, the Putinites denounce the sins that may occur under the reign of liberty with the same ardor, the same sincerity, and the same purpose that animated their Soviet forebears.

Censorship no longer works by hiding information from you; censorship works by flooding you with immense amounts of misinformation, of irrelevant information, of funny cat videos, until you're just unable to focus.

Vladimir Putin understood, from the Communist era when he was a KGB officer, that the Russian propaganda system of targeting Western media - that in the digital world, you could easily pull the Western media around by a nose ring.

From kindergarten, I knew that politics is something that you talk about only at home, because if you weren't quiet, your parents might be taken to prison. All Estonian families have these kind of stories.

Not a single story on 'BBC World News' is any different from the British foreign policy.

Because North Korea was so totally cut off, we didn't hear anything of the outside world. We had only one TV channel, which showed only propaganda, and we believed everything.

Governments want to control information. To do this, they have elaborate systems for promoting themselves via propaganda departments and for ensuring confidentiality with official-secrets laws. There are good reasons for these: people need information, and national security deserves secrecy.

During the entire communist era, communist ideology was imposed on children. That was Bolshevism.

We should never have any political or religious organization filter our news.

It's bleak behind the Iron Curtain, although they do have the strongest vodka I've ever had in my life.

If you control the flow of information, you can control the conversation around important issues. If you can control the conversation, you can change this country.

The de facto censorship which leaves so many Americans functionally illiterate about the history of US foreign affairs may be all the more effective because it is not official, heavy-handed or conspiratorial, but woven artlessly into the fabric of education and media. No conspiracy is needed.