John Hall Quotes

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

To say that the newspaper press represents public opinion is to administer insult to intelligent men. It is the property of speculators, political leaders, large contractors and railway directors.

Arab media is market driven like the American media. It does not so much shape public opinion as much as it reflects it.

In the corporate media, there is almost no criticism of corporations or American empire.

It is not at all clear how much the media influences public opinion and how much public opinion influences the media.

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.

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.

Which suggests something about media and war: it's not just that events happen and the media documents and presents them. There is a third element: what the public is ready to accept, what the public wants to know.

With the exception of the New York Times, Fox news, and Lou Dobbs of CNN, and talk radio, the rest of the mainstream media has basically been silenced like a bunch of dumb monkeys.

In the corporate-owned media, men dressed like Ronald Reagan and women dressed like Rita Hayworth disseminate grotesque exaggerations and gossip in authoritative tones.

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.

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

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.

Capitalism and people who control the market have a large hand in everything. It doesn't have anything to do with figuring out what the crowd wants to hear. It has to do with the media deciding what they think people want to hear.

...the mass media. What are they? They're huge corporations, massive corporations, linked up with even bigger corporations. They sell audiences to other businesses, namely advertisers. So when you turn on the television set, CBS doesn't make any money. They make money from the advertisers. You're the product that they're selling, and the same is true of the daily newspaper. They're huge corporations, selling audiences, potential consumers, to other businesses, all linked up closely to the government, especially the big media. What picture of the world do you expect them to present?

The handful of corporations that own most of the media outlets have an interest in reflecting establishment views.

Polls are the corporate media's standardized tests to determine how well we have learned what it has taught us.

It's no surprise that the corporate media, and many of the nonprofits that are dependent on the big money, they are not allowing our campaign the real alternative to see the light of day.

Does the mainstream media have a liberal bias? On a couple of things, maybe. Compared to the American public at large, probably a slightly higher percentage of journalists, because of thier enhanced power of discernment, realize they know a gay person or two, and are, therefore, less frightened of them.

If you're an independent, you don't get on TV. And in the rare instances that you do get on, you get a fraction of what that very same movie would get if it came in through Fox or Viacom.

You have never had fair press in America.

These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.