Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

In the old days, there were three networks, and all of a sudden, Walter Cronkite is the most trusted man in America. Everybody believes what he says, not even thinking. In those days, we didn't even know it was being spun. We were very willing to just listen to it and go along with.

There is a vast mass of opinion in this country represented neither by the politicians nor by the Press, and considerably saner than either.

The Pulpit, the Press, and the Novel—these undisputedly are the great molders of public opinion and public morals to-day.

Observer's Paradox: How you are doing in the polls will affect how you are doing in the polls.

The front pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times are very important in shaping what other people think. They're like writing a memo to the White House.

Television has spread the habit of instant reaction and has stimulated the hope of instant results.

It’s always a danger when an institution like the press becomes disconnected from the people.

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America—not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

Acting upon everybody for 30 minutes in 24 hours, the press is asked to create a mystical force called Public Opinion that will take up the slack in public institutions. The press has often mistakenly pretended that it could do just that.

Newspapers at that time did not necessarily try to flatter those in power. Rather, they wrote to please readers. I may sound evasive. but there certainly existed some kind of mechanism that aggravated the situation through subtle interactions between newspapers and the public. Readers were waiting for articles reporting the exploits of the victorious Imperial Forces, Newspapers indulged themselves in a competition to appear more patriotic and to see who could print the most articles urging and exalting victory. Newspaper companies cooperated through the dispatch of entertainers, calls for patriotic songs, campaigns for contributions to build more airplanes, and various other ways. The heavy responsibility that the newspapers bear is second only to that of the government.

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.

The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen, and the far spread magazine, rules the country.

Whatever may be said about the power of the press, it is undeniable that it can set the entire public thinking and talking about any topic ...

For anyone in the news business, just the name 'Cronkite' conjures up images of a bygone era when journalists covered, and could at times impact, the most important stories of the day, rather than the most 'compelling' or salacious.

The American people are entitled to see the president and to hear his views directly, and not to see him only through the press

It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment.

Arab media is market driven like the American media. It does not so much shape public opinion as much as it reflects it.

Nobody believes an official spokesman. Everybody believes an unnamed source.

The White House expansion to control the entire corpus of the News was the direct result of television.

How can you govern if you always have to feed the news cycle?

Politics is television and whoever masters it is likely to win.

It’s a lot easier and cheaper to have thumbsuckers and pundits on television than it is to have reporters and news bureaus around the world.

The primary purpose of the media is to mobilize support for the controlling interests.

Our government has become too responsive to trivial or ephemeral concerns, often at the expense of more important concerns or an erosion of our liberty, and it has made policy priorities more dependent on where TV journalists happen to point their cameras....

The newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct