Nayef Al-Rodhan Quotes

To be honest with you, I worry about concentration of ownership in media, where you have a handful of media conglomerates largely controlling what we see, hear and read.

The American people should be made aware of the trend toward monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of more and more power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands.

A city with one newspaper, or with a morning and an evening paper under one ownership, is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.

The freedom of the press throughout the world where the capitalists rule, is the freedom to buy up papers, the freedom to buy writers, to buy and manufacture public opinion in the interest of the capitalists.

Virtually every magazine, newspaper, TV station and cable channel is owned by a big corporation, and they've squashed stories that they don't want the public to know about.

During the run up to the Iraq War, Mike Farrell and I did get on television kind of frequently, but then they saw that that didn't work. They really couldn't bait us into being stupid, so they stopped. You know the mainstream media, corporate media, avoids ever giving anyone who has anything to say a platform, if they can possibly help it.

And we've become very doubtful of our information sources, because they're all controlled by these huge multilateral corporations.

You have to be down here in the States to realize just how tightly controlled the corporate media is and how much they practise Soviet-style censorship through creative omission.

The media is too concentrated, too few people own too much. There's really five companies that control 90 percent of what we read, see and hear. It's not healthy.

As the mainstream media has become increasingly dependent on advertising revenues for support, it has become an anti-democratic force in society.

Let me make the newspapers, and I care not what is preached in the pulpit or what is enacted in Congress.

The media in America has become so cowed and compromised.

I do not believe in censorship, but I believe we already have censorship in what is called marketing theory, namely the only information we get in mainstream media is for profit.

All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake “public opinion” for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.

There isn't much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.

I don't like to sit around whining about the corporate media, how they control everything, own everything. We already know that.

Media is set up to give information to the people - at least that's what it says. But we all know in the U.S. that media is a capitalistic system, people are getting paid to write things, they have bosses and editors, and they have bosses, and they put pressure on people to write intriguing stories that catch the eye.

The media is controlled.

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

The truth is not in the commercial media because the truth is a dagger pointed at its heart, which is its pocketbook.

Mexico just needs more journalists, and especially more good places to publish and exhibit. There are all kinds of censorship practiced in Mexico, not just violent repression. Perhaps the biggest threat to good journalism here is the massive power of the country's media monoliths - Televisa and TV Azteca - who have 80% of the market. They endlessly saturate the country with propaganda and inanity.

We talk about a free press. These people hide, they make a lot of money off the media. They hide behind the slogans of free press, and then they can come out with crap like that. It's just garbage. It's insulting to the readers.

In the end, does it really matter if newspapers physically disappear? Probably not: the world is always changing. But does it matter if organisations independent enough and rich enough to employ journalists to do their job disappear? Yes, that matters hugely; it affects the whole of life and society.

I can assure you that I have never used my media companies for propaganda, and I will never do so.

Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.