Michael Gartner Quotes

And the big issue here, I think, is that the publisher took over the editorial pages, a guy named Jeff Johnson. He's an accountant from Chicago, doesn't know anything about what newspapers are supposed to be about, and he made a decision to get rid of the column.

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.

When journalism is treated as just another widget in a commercial enterprise, the focus isn't on truth, verification or public good, but productivity and output.

There is no independent American print or TV media.

In the end, does it really matter if newspapers physically disappear? Probably not: the world is always changing. But does it matter if organisations independent enough and rich enough to employ journalists to do their job disappear? Yes, that matters hugely; it affects the whole of life and society.

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.

You don't tell us how to stage the news and we don't tell you how to cover it.

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

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

News, by and large, has been the purest of all the television mediums, or at least we've tried to keep it that way, and there constantly is the argument about the separation between church and state.

I went into journalism to do journalism, not advertising.

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.

Our founding fathers could not have foreseen that freedom of the press might eventually be threatened just as much by media consolidation as by government.

The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins.

The American people should be made aware of the trend toward monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of more and more power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands.

A newspaper is a public trust, and we will suffer as a society without them. It is not the Internet that has killed them. It is their own greed, it is their own stupidity, and it is capitalism that has taken our daily newspapers from us.

The truth is, I don't have any problem with journalists - I count some of them as friends - also some of my heroes are journalists, I'm a big fan of Robert Fisk - great people or crazy people who are prepared to stand up for what's right.

To own the dominant, or only, newspaper in a mid-sized American city was, for many decades, a kind of license to print money. In the Internet age, however, no one has figured out how to rescue the newspaper in the United States or abroad.

The central dilemma in journalism is that you don't know what you don't know.

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.

There isn't much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.

I've thought for years that newspapers should all be owned by nonprofits.

I'm a journalism junkie.