Richard Schickel Quotes

I spent my time drinking and staring at a television in the airport bar. More death and destruction. Crime. Pollution. All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things I didn´t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers.

Television is democracy at its ugliest.

Television was supposed to be a national park. Instead it has become a money machine. It's a commodity now, just like pork bellies.

The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.

I don't think the advertisers have any real idea of their power not only to reflect but to mold society.

People say I manipulate the media. Well, duh. We live in a media culture, so why on earth wouldn't I?

The concept that the press is an organ of government policy dies hard.

The press, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.

What matters to the press matters perforce to politicians.

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.

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

Some newspapers in Britain have become closer to these kind of mafia families. They wield an incredible power. They choose our governments, they choose our prime ministers, and they live above the law.

As soon as people enter a theater they must become moron consumers who must be fed information.

I used to believe that we could change the media. I was as naive as anybody.

Is there any other industry [than the press] in this country which seeks to presume so completely to give the customer what he does not want?

You have people talk about the media as a coequal branch when talking about Republicans. "You know, Republicans have to overcome the media, and then the Democrats." Wait a minute. Why should anybody have to overcome the media?

Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing — a golem. And, indeed, this image, sick-eningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming.

Donald Trump has the media wrapped around his little finger. And this is a contributing factor to why so many people are bothered and upset, because even in the Republican establishment, the media is looked at as a legitimate player in the power arrangement of politics.

The power of the media is really the only new issue in the last 50 years, probably.

A large percentage of those living in developed societies are told what brand of soda they should drink, what cigarettes they should smoke, what clothes and shoes they should wear, what they should eat and what brand of food they should buy. Their political ideas are supplied in the same way. Every year a trillion dollars is spent on advertising.

Media is a big problem around the world, it's powerful and can abuse its power.

The media can't take Trump out, and that scares the heck out of everybody, particularly in the Republican side.

We live in a media culture and whoever controls and influences and uses media the best has the power for change.

The left understands the media. The left wields it, and the right sits on the sidelines and complains.

When the masters of industry pay such sums for a newspaper, they buy not merely the building and the presses and the name; they buy what they call the "good-will"- that is, they buy you. And they proceed to change your whole psychology - everything that you believe about life. You might object to it, if you knew; but they do their work so subtly that you never guess what is happening to you!