Gwen Ifill Quotes

Social media and young people, art, music, all communications make this one of the most active times for activism. It will be a time of change.

The Chinese government clearly does pay attention to public opinion expressed on the Internet - the extent to which they choose to adapt their practices based on it, or ignore it, seems to vary.

CNN has given me a platform to share my experiences. My Web site, YouTube Channel and Facebook page have exposed me to thousands of voters who share my concerns. My lack of seniority has not impeded my ability to communicate in any way.

The consumption of news is up, but the way people are receiving the news has changed

If Paul Revere were on his ride today, he would be tweeting.

Once a citizen feels he is not powerless, he can aspire for more change. ... First, the Web democratized commerce, and then it democratized media, and now it is democratizing democracy.

Oftentimes the … media only partially quote what politicians say. This has prevented the public from understanding my true intentions. So now I am sending messages through Facebook and other networks directly to the public.

The blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it's not journalism.

We became the first political movement in Italy, and the media didn't even realize it.

Whether you have a hundred friends on Facebook or whether you're on TV or whatever, at every level, everybody has a platform. We all have a responsibility, given what's going on, to speak using that platform as much as we can, and to engage. Whether that's calling members of Congress, marching, getting involved locally, getting involved with Let America Vote, or if all you can get done during the day is you see the news and you want to make sure your hundred friends on Facebook know what you think about it, that is a really important part of this.

They're [social media] amazing tools to communicate information - especially about different causes or crises or movements.

I would never join the Tea Partiers, because I don't have a problem with the color of Obama's skin. I don't have a problem with immigrants. You know what I mean? I do have genuine problems with policy and government corruption. Sure I do. And I speak very candidly about that, regardless of who's in office. But since the Tea Partiers are ridiculous, why would I urge anyone to participate with them?

Indeed, the best practical reason to think that social media can help bring political change is that both dissidents and governments think they can. All over the world, activists believe in the utility of these tools and take steps to use them accordingly. And the governments they contend with think social media tools are powerful, too, and are willing to harass, arrest, exile, or kill users in response.

You can say something from a public toilet and the whole world will know because the media will be there.

In this era of instant communications, the people want instant results.

Evil news fly faster still than good.

Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d'état, still use tanks. If a country has reached a high degree of industrialization the whole scene changes. The day after the fall of Khrushchev, the editors of Pravda, Izvestiia, the heads of the radio and television were replaced; the army wasn't called out. Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.

Who wants to hear that he is wrong when he can be told that he is right? …. We are losing the ability to change our mind because of our media.

...history can carry on no successful competition with news, in the matter of sharp interest. When an eye-witness sets down in narrative form some extraordinary occurrence which he has witnessed, that is news -- that is the news form, and its interest is absolutely indestructible; time can have no deteriorating effect upon that episode.

The legend went, unconfirmed and unaccredited, but still propagated.

It is only in the freest of nations that people can not only criticize the government, fairly or unfairly, but in extraordinarily few—only the greatest—do the negative criticisms get very wide distribution. Look for the nation where their media are full of criticisms, and there you will find a nation sufficiently free and confident to consider possible improvement from any and all sources.

Overall, the world has never been better informed.

There are a lot of ways to practice the art of journalism, and one of them is to use your art like a hammer to destroy the right people — who are almost always your enemies, for one reason or another, and who usually deserve to be crippled, because they are wrong. This is a dangerous notion, and very few professional journalists will endorse it — calling it "vengeful" and "primitive" and "perverse" regardless of how often they might do the same thing themselves. "That kind of stuff is opinion," they say, "and the reader is cheated if it's not labelled as opinion." Well, maybe so. Maybe Tom Paine cheated his readers and Mark Twain was a devious fraud with no morals at all who used journalism for his own foul ends. And maybe H. L. Mencken should have been locked up for trying to pass off his opinions on gullible readers and normal "objective journalism." Mencken understood that politics — as used in journalism — was the art of controlling his environment, and he made no apologies for it. In my case, using what politely might be called "advocacy journalism," I've used reporting as a weapon to affect political situations that bear down on my environment.

Our job is to bash the President.

Well, our job is to bash the President, that's what we do almost …