Smriti Irani Quotes

As our leaders in Washington confront tough decisions about our budget priorities, I urge them to continue federal funding for public broadcasting.

Almost anything is better than three network TV outlets completely controlling the national discourse with their nightly broadcasts. We've moved a long way from that, and that's important.

It would be a shame if the BBC didn't exist.

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.

I think it is absolutely essential in a democracy to have competition in the media, a lot of competition, and we seem to be moving away from that.

Common sense tells us that this explosion of media sources should eliminate any concern over a lack of diversity of views in the marketplace and competition.

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.

Well, many of us believe that excessive media concentration is a subject that ought to be addressed, and it is, of course, the intention of the majority party not to allow that to be discussed.

There is no independent American print or TV media.

People pay their licence fee in this country because people believe that we should have public service broadcast programming. Of course, there are lots of different ways you could do that.

If you look at my CV, just about everything I have done has come through a publicly funded institution; it is a career entirely built on that sort of support.

Our free enterprise system of disseminating information is collectively referred to as The Media. But there is no collective.

It's no secret that the media has fragmented in recent years, that audiences have been cut into slivers, and that more and more people get their news from ever narrower outlets.

Consumers can choose from hundreds of channels today, including dozens for kids. At a time of dwindling resources, we don't need to be subsidizing PBS. It's time for Big Bird the mooch to compete with 'Dora the Explorer' and 'Bob the Builder.'

Broadcasting is really too important to be left to the broadcasters.

No genuinely avant-garde artist should ever be on the government dole.

Incredible that liberals aren't more concerned about the monopoly of information in South Dakota.

Europe has a press that stresses opinions; America a press, radio, and television that emphasize news.

Our founding fathers could not have foreseen that freedom of the press might eventually be threatened just as much by media consolidation as by government.

Also, the commercial media in a superior position, really, to any other corporate lobby, because where would people hear about commercial media or corporate media criticism, where would they hear criticism of them other than in the commercial media?

We are developing a media policy which would be about breaking up single ownership of too many sources of information so that we have a multiplicity of sources.

“If the United States…can pass laws to block media cross ownership within one market to protect the diversity of voices, then we in Canada must ask ourselves why we do not seem to attach the same importance to that important principle.

I'm a product of Federal spending.

The real problem ... is to get to this unfair [press] coverage.... Use the anti-trust division [of the Justice Department] to investigate various media relating to anti-trust violations. Even the threat of anti-trust action I think would be effective in changing their views ...

It's not censorship. It's common sense use of the taxpayer's money.