Edward R. Murrow Quotes

We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media

For governments at war, the media is an instrument of war or an element in war that is to be controlled.

Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.

The military has been determined to control the images of war since Vietnam. They're convinced that they lost the war because of loss of political support back home, because people saw what was going on.

The key battleground in the war on terrorism, therefore, is in the minds of the American public.

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

Public opinion wins war. I have always considered as quasi-staff officers, correspondents accredited to my headquarters.

Putin drops bombs. We drop leaflets.

Two increasing themes which appear to dominate our listening, reading and watching lives are propaganda and 'national security', or manufactured war.

The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play.

If we turn to the war in Kosovo, what do we find? We find the manipulation of the audience's emotions by the mass media.

If you start studying history closer, you'll find that most all wars are based on false flag operations to get people - to convince the people that they're under attack in some way so that they will support the wars.

It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale.

Everyone in China knows The Topics. The television stations and newspapers run the same state-generated stories all across the country, and the Chinese form their opinions based on these somewhat controlled sources.

The most important thing in our war preparations is to teach all our people to hate U.S. imperialism. Otherwise, we will not be able to defeat the U.S. imperialists who boast of their technological superiority.

Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.

In any war, there is a concealment of certain kinds of setbacks because it's propaganda for the enemy.

And, consequently, the art of propaganda or public information becomes one of the most powerful forms of directive statesmanship.

The press is our chief ideological weapon.

One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.

The real violence is committed in the writing of history, the records of the legal system, the reporting of news, through the manipulation of social contracts, and the control of information.

Hollywood likes to put out their own message out a lot of times, and that message isn't the best one for everyone.

The papers are only going to show what they want the readers to see. It's all propaganda, to be honest.

People, even independently minded people, do to an extent draw their impressions from what they are told, especially if they are told it incessantly by newspapers.

Power in America today is control of the means of communication.