Walter Benjamin Quotes

The Press, which is mostly controlled by vested interests, has an excessive influence on public opinion.

The presentation of an issue can no longer be controlled.

...the liberty of the Press is called the Palladium of Freedom, which means, in these days, the liberty of being deceived, swindled, and humbugged by the Press and paying hugely for the deception.

Today the greatest evil—and therefore the most immediate—is the press.

I mean the idea of this is that it's a good thing for the public to hear interviews like this and that there will be an inevitable amount of fewer interviews if people that the press talks to wind up thinking, well, it's not really a CBS correspondent.

Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.

The nation whose population depends on the explosively compressed headline service of television news can expect to be exploited by the demagogues and dictators who prey upon the semi-informed.

The journalistic traits that are valued on TV and radio talk shows are destructive to democracy.

Newspapers form public opinion, but public opinion also influences newspapers. The general masses are not like horses that can be tamed and trained to do their masters bidding.

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

What you say about the newspapers is very true ... They are indeed a curious compound of truth and untruth. I am so used to newspaper nonsense and attacks that I do not mind it in the least....

We suffer quite as much from exaggerated, hysterical, and untruthful statements in the press as from any wrongdoing by businessmen or politicians.

The American media wants to pump you full of fear.

You cannot have the media so close to you that it becomes your voice. This is no good because it becomes too extreme, and people will resent it.

At the end of the day, media is going to say whatever they're going to say.

People see whatever the media first reports.

I choose to let the press say whatever they want and let people say whatever they want.

The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gasmask handy, it is our business to puncture gasbags and discover the seeds of truth.

Don't worry over what the newspapers say. I don't. Why should anyone else? I told the truth to the newspaper correspondents - but when you tell the truth to them they are at sea.

I wouldn't agree with some of the things that the press writes about and that's all I have to say about that.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.

For billionaires who cannot buy good press, there is the option of buying the press.

The papers, you know, they're always gonna just make stuff up. They think it's in the public interest.

Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.