Thomas Friedman Quotes

Fox Televison News is reaching Third Reich standards of media coverage of world affairs.

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.

The media dresses things up. There's a lot of inaccuracy.

You know, the media always tries to twist things and make things into what they're not.

I think the media spends a lot of time fooling itself.

The media doesn't always reflect reality.

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

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 press ... is but the servant of human intellect and its ministry is for good or evil, according to the character of those who direct it. The press is a mill that grinds all that is put into its hopper. Fill the hopper with poisoned grain and it will grind it to meal, but there is death in the bread.

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.

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.

There is no lie too improbable, no distortion too great, no smear campaign too dirty for the State Department and the media to embrace.

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.

Increasingly, people have very little tolerance for anything that smacks of propaganda.

I never, ever have seen media this way. It's almost indescribable. Making up stories, refusing to run real stories. It's making themselves look like utter fools. There's no journalism, there is no media. There's pure, full-fledged advocacy here.

The media dwells mostly on negativity.

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

The mainstream media has its own agenda. They do not want to print the facts. They have an agenda, they have a slant, they have a bias. It is outrageous to me.

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.

Fair and balanced is doublespeak for bite-out-chunks-of-truth until only irrelevancy is left, byte-sized, entertaining irrelevancy

News and entertainment are getting dangerously intertwined.

The media I’ve had a lot to do with is lazy. we fed them and they ate it everyday.

The political misrepresentation of facts is one of the incidents of a free press in every free country.

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.

I deplore with you, the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them.... As vehicles of information, and a curb on our functionaries, they have rendered themselves useless, by forfeiting all title to belief.