Ivan Reitman Quotes

Even in an enlightened democracy, the media have to check themselves to make sure they are not contributing to an unnecessary mass hysteria.

There's been an amazing backlash for the last decade in America: political correctness. In many ways, I think that, while we've been remarkably violent in our media, there's been a real schizophrenia. In private, on the Internet, and on public-affairs shows or talk radio, we're way more explicit than we've ever been. But traditional Hollywood has been much more frightened than it ever was in the '70s about presenting things that could be perceived as politically incorrect.

So, if falling crime rates coincide with the rise of violent video games and increasing violence on TV and at the cinema, should we conclude that media violence is causing the drop in crime rates?

Not merely can people like me write things that would never have been printed before but I think an enormously dramatic change has taken place in public opinion, possibly for the wrong reasons.

For the sake of public discourse, for the demands of the free market, and for the value we place in citizen advocacy, Rush Limbaugh must go.

There is a continuous stream of opinions on governance issues expressed daily, not only in our Parliament and in the print media, but also on talk-radio and social media.

If by the liberty of the press were understood merely the liberty of discussing the propriety of public measures and political opinions, let us have as much of it as you please: But if it means the liberty of affronting, calumniating and defaming one another, I, for my part, own myself willing to part with my share of it, whenever our legislators shall please so to alter the law and shall cheerfully consent to exchange my liberty of abusing others for the privilege of not being abused myself.

I was brought up when media still kept totally away from violence when it came to children. I don't think it would have made me scared of violence, but I find it repulsive.

I don't control what people say. I don't control what people put on dot-com or anything else.

I think there's a difference between calling people out and understanding the role that the press plays in a free society.

In Britian we have a free press. It's not a pretty press, but it's free. The people who can't bear the Daily Mail, they say: 'you should ban it'. No, no, no, no, you don't ban it... you don't buy it.

I have never quite grasped the worry about the power of the press. After all, it speaks with a thousand voices, in constant dissonance.

We cannot turn our back and say that violence in films or anything that we do doesn't have a sort of influence. It does.

I avoid all the language and nudity and violence and everything. I have enough of that at home.

In the early 2000s, people expected that anonymity on the Internet would be positive for the development of democracy in South Korea. In a Confucian culture like South Korea's, hierarchy can block the free exchange of opinions in face-to-face situations. The web offered a way around that.

We need a free media, not just freedom of speech.

The media's power is frail. Without the people's support, it can be shut off with the ease of turning a light switch.

There is a cultural factor promoting violence which nowadays undoubtedly is highly effective is the mass media. And particularly everything that enters our minds through pictorial media.

The thought that so many people get their news from social media really is scary.

There's nothing that you can say in the paper that should affect you.

I don't think about the media.

Still, most of those effects occur in the context of harmless play and it is patently obvious that children are not normally turned into aggressive little monsters by TV or video games, since most children do not become aggressive little monsters.

At least in the West, politicians, corporations and media moguls can no longer take for granted their power to control the public discourse - and have it go unchallenged.

The days of the Pentagon Papers debates seem long past, when a sudden transparency yielded insight into fights over war and peace and freedom and security; the transparency afforded by Twitter and Facebook yields insights that extend no further than a lawmaker's boundless narcissism and a culture's pitiless prurience.

People want to have a voice and a say in what is news.