Michael Crichton Quotes

I operate on the principle that the mass media will never be accurate. They never have been. When did yellow journalism begin? After all, their basic principle is, simplify and exaggerate.

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

The truth is not wonderful enough to suit the newspapers; so they enlarge upon it, and invent ridiculous embellishments.

The good news does not make the front pages. The bad news does make the front pages.

Those bastards [the press] can rip a single page out of the Bible, and if they play it right, they can make Jesus Christ sound like the devil.

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.

I think a lot of things get blown out of proportion in the media.

The primacy of preaching over reporting inevitably leads journalism down a path of hyperbole, distortion and outright fabrication.

The media know exactly what they're doing, focusing our attention on Arsenio's hairdo. We need to keep our brains brimming with rubbish. If we didn't, we might think about things.

I just think that the media is just making things up. I don't really pay attention.

I think there are a lot of reasons to be critical of the media in America.

Increasingly, people have very little tolerance for anything that smacks of propaganda.

Television is something the Russians invented to destroy American education.

Anybody who has had the pleasure of reading an article about themselves in the press knows that, on the whole, there is a huge amount of inaccuracy, value judgment and the use of a crowbar to insert editorial bias that reflects the current political leaning of that particular paper.

The media dwells mostly on negativity.

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.

I don't believe what the papers are saying They're just out to capture my dime, Exaggerating this, exaggerating that.

The media lies to us all the time, and we always believe the media.

The lowest form of popular culture - lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives - has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.

... infiltrate and neutralize the mainstream American media.

The press ... is but the servant of human intellect and its ministry is for good or evil, according to the character of those who direct it. The press is a mill that grinds all that is put into its hopper. Fill the hopper with poisoned grain and it will grind it to meal, but there is death in the bread.

While they shriek for "freedom of the press" when there is no slightest threat to that freedom, they deny to citizens that freedom from the press to which the decencies of life entitle them. They misrepresent, they distort, they color, they blackguard, they lie.

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion.

The Arab Press is a deeply distorted lens.

Yellow journalism is defined by prominent headlines that screamed excitement, often about comparatively unimportant news; a lavish use of pictures, many of them without significance; faked interviews and stories; a Sunday supplement and color comics; and a more or less ostentatious sympathy with the 'underdog,' with campaigns against abuses suffered by the common people.