Noam Chomsky Quotes

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

The book Manufacturing Consent, which I co-authored with Edward Herman, begins with a description of the structure and institutional setting of the commercial media, and then draws some rather simple-minded conclusions about what we would expect the media product to be, given these (not particularly controversial) conditions.

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

The Congressional leaders set the agenda for journalism; it's not the other way around.

Television is democracy at its ugliest.

It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale.

I think the media is a real demon.

Television enjoys a de facto monopoly on what goes into the heads of a significant part of the population and what they think.

The power is to set the agenda. What we print and what we don't print matter a lot.

The presentation of an issue can no longer be controlled.

The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen, and the far spread magazine, rules the country.

Whatever may be said about the power of the press, it is undeniable that it can set the entire public thinking and talking about any topic ...

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.

People have their own opinions but sometimes with the media things get chopped up and cut around to make stories out of it.

I am not afraid of mass media.

People see whatever the media first reports.

The greatest power of the mass media is the power to ignore. The worst thing about this power is that you may not even know you're using it.

I don't know how you can do it, if you don't recognition the media as a power center in America.

Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.

I think that reality TV is so bad. It is a tool by the media to not make people think.

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.

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.

The media cause more problems than they do good.

Media play a powerful role in establishing and perpetuating social norms.

One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.