Spiro Agnew Quotes

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.

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 media is controlled.

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.

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.

I do not believe in censorship, but I believe we already have censorship in what is called marketing theory, namely the only information we get in mainstream media is for profit.

In a hyper-capitalist environment dominated by media giants, the means available to independent journalism have narrowed considerably.

We should never have any political or religious organization filter our news.

The problem that we've had is four media companies run media, globally. And some say they're on the Right and some say they're on the Left; look, they're all afraid of losing Ford as a client. So they're all, by definition, huge companies that are going to be inherently conservative.

Let me make the newspapers, and I care not what is preached in the pulpit or what is enacted in Congress.

A city with one newspaper, or with a morning and an evening paper under one ownership, is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.

Power in America today is control of the means of communication.

If the American President had control of the media, his job would be much easier.

The media's power is frail. Without the people's support, it can be shut off with the ease of turning a light switch.

Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.

Most of the press is in league with government, or with the status quo.

That's the heart of it: My shows were not that controversial with the American people. They were controversial with the people who think for the American people.

It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press. This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.

I think the Internet's been a tremendous tool in terms of breaking down the power structure of information and entertainment, particularly at a time when so much information and entertainment were in the hands of so few people, with multinationals owning everything.

You have to be down here in the States to realize just how tightly controlled the corporate media is and how much they practise Soviet-style censorship through creative omission.

As the mainstream media has become increasingly dependent on advertising revenues for support, it has become an anti-democratic force in society.

The media in America has become so cowed and compromised.

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

Having a few companies controlling everything we read, see or hear is destroying our culture.