James Woods Quotes

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

In order to govern you have to feed the news cycle

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.

Because I live and work in Washington, D.C., I have a ringside seat at the world capital of The Persuasive Arts, or, as I like to call it, The Opinions Racket.

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

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.

Newspapers form public opinion, but public opinion also influences newspapers. The general masses are not like horses that can be tamed and trained to do their masters bidding.

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

Today the greatest evil—and therefore the most immediate—is the press.

The ones who are the smartest are the ones who use us. In other words, they understand the relationship between the press and leaders.

The media—stenographers to power.

If we turn to the war in Kosovo, what do we find? We find the manipulation of the audience's emotions by the mass media.

Politicians are just Daily Mail journalists writ large, aren't they? They're always telling us what's going to happen, and we know they don't know!

The press is our chief ideological weapon.

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.

For billionaires who cannot buy good press, there is the option of buying the press.

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

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

We studied Western journalists' reporting methods, fed them story ideas, steered them toward sympathetic interviewees, and supplied them with the revolutionary movement's facts and figures.

The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. But, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and the war aims and operating plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play. There is no more appalling caricature of freedom of thought. Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to want to think, and this they consider freedom.

The good news does not make the front pages. The bad news does make the front pages.

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

Every organization has men and women who will be sure that the news gets out when it is good news. The problem is with the bad news. That is the challenge of democracy

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.

Burke said there were three estates in Parliament; but in the reporter's gallery yonder, there sat a fourth estate more important far than they all.