John Pilger Quotes

Editorialists who tell downright lies in order to advance their own agendas do more to discredit the press than all the censors in the world.

You read some columnists in the newspapers; you have to wonder who they are really working for. You can see they have an agenda.

The primacy of preaching over reporting inevitably leads journalism down a path of hyperbole, distortion and outright fabrication.

Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics.

The press has made up so much...God...awful, horrifying stories...it has made me realize the more often you hear a lie, I mean, you begin to believe it.

I feel sad when I realize how much truth is being changed or obscured in the American media.

I know every politician spins the truth a little.

Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, 'What is real?' Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.

The media lies to us all the time, and we always believe the media.

The second is the damage to the credibility and independence of a free press which may be caused by covert relationships with the U.S. journalists and media organizations.

I'll see Naomi Wolf on television periodically, I have nothing against her and what she says, but I'll feel that she's a politician, like she's got an agenda to get across and that she doesn't always say what's really true or exactly what she feels.

Giving the same value to fiction as to fact in the interest of so-called fairness is to mislead the American people and the press has become party to that.

The strategies and assumptions [of the propaganda model] are fundamentally contrary to a democratic model.... The goal of the propaganda model is simply to achieve efficient indoctrination, and it therefore tends to regard the assumptions of the democratic model as inconvenient obstacles to efficient communication.

In this crazy political business, at least in our times, a lie unanswered becomes truth within 24 hours.

While they shriek for "freedom of the press" when there is no slightest threat to that freedom, they deny to citizens that freedom from the press to which the decencies of life entitle them. They misrepresent, they distort, they color, they blackguard, they lie.

The Arab Press is a deeply distorted lens.

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....

I operate on the principle that the mass media will never be accurate. They never have been. When did yellow journalism begin? After all, their basic principle is, simplify and exaggerate.

Diplomats lie to journalists, then believe the headlines.

We live in an age where people can not only choose their own sources, but they can choose their own facts.

It's CNN's bigger problem that CNN wants to deny reality. I, too, used to drink the Kool-Aid that it was a top journalism operation that reports without bias. Now that I'm outside the walls of traditional media, I know there is no such thing.

What I notice now is that a lot of the things that are said to us on camera, on air, are not particularly believed and quite often not true. It is an extraordinary position to be in. It is a really weird position to be in as a journalist.

In the United States, journalists receive awards for lying for the government and for the corporations.

The media is done, they don't do journalism anymore, it's activism, nothing more, right?