Arundhati Roy Quotes

The Iraq War was the biggest issue for people of my generation in the West. It was also the clearest case, in my living memory, of media manipulation and the creation of a war through ignorance.

Despite failing to get bin Laden, the U.S. government and media portrayed the early Afghanistan war as a great victory.

Listen, we’re making good progress in Iraq. Sometimes its hard to tell it when you listen to the filter.

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....

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

The consensual seduction of the mainstream media by and with the government is one of the most dangerous toxins at work in America today.

I know politics; I know the media.

The press is the enemy.

The distinction between reality and fiction in America seems like it is becoming really blurry. With its religious fanaticism, reality TV programs and fake news broadcasts being aired by the government, the States feel like they are entering the Dark Ages.

Short, successful military adventures are as effective as the Super Bowl in diverting people's attention from unpleasant truths.

One big, glaring difference I can think of between Iraq and Vietnam is the news coverage. During the Vietnam War era, you had TV coverage of the war saturating the airwaves every night, and that coverage wasn't put through a military filter at all.

When Bush first got elected, the very first time there was talk of going to war with Iraq, the mainstream media gave his position total credibility. I didn't get it then, and I don't get it now.

It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.

Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.

The function of government is to provide you with service; the function of the media is to supply the Vaseline.

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

The expressions of newspapers, like those of orators, could not be accepted without allowance, for they aimed at producing some desired effect, and said either more or less than the truth.

The news media more and more considered the politicians to be props in their entertainment shows.

Those bastards [the press] can rip a single page out of the Bible, and if they play it right, they can make Jesus Christ sound like the devil.

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 media can make or break an administration.

The presentation of an issue can no longer be controlled.

I am being portrayed as some kind of a medieval monster ... a megalomaniac. If the people were to really believe all that the press has written about me then I must be the most evil person in the country today.

Of all newspaper presses, I never heard anyone deny that the American is the worst.... [N]othing is easier than to make the people know only one side of a question; few things are easier than to keep them altogether from the knowledge of any particular affair; and, worse than all, on them [the American people] may easily be practiced the discovery that lies may work their intended effect, before the truth can overtake them. It is hard to tell which is worse; the wide diffusion of things that are not true or the suppression of things that are.

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.