Michael Ledeen Quotes

Television is democracy at its ugliest.

Polls are the corporate media's standardized tests to determine how well we have learned what it has taught us.

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

A democracy doesn’t use force to control its citizens; it uses propaganda instead.

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

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

Public opinion can be influential, the media can be influential.

They have been talking about a dictatorship and they were right because there's a dictatorship and there's a government that has been fighting that dictatorship, the dictatorship of the media.

The power of the periodical press is second only to that of the people.

Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.

Whoever controls the media—the images—controls the culture.

The nation whose population depends on the explosively compressed headline service of television news can expect to be exploited by the demagogues and dictators who prey upon the semi-informed.

The media can make or break an administration.

If the American President had control of the media, his job would be much easier.

With the instrument of radio you can make public opinion. Perhaps even conquer a country.

Television has become the primary precinct of politics.

By choice, polls validate the media’s filtered view of the world.

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 White House expansion to control the entire corpus of the News was the direct result of television.

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.

Why can't the Indonesians have an Islamic theocracy if they want? Why can't the Pakistanis have a military dictatorship? Why can't the Serbs run their own country the way they prefer? What is the appeal in making sure that people whose minds have been wasted by Alzheimer's Disease vote? Well, let's not beat around the bush: the appeal of mass democracy lies in the fact that in essentially every country in the world today, the number of persons unable to think for themselves is substantially larger than the number able to make independent decisions. Those unable to think for themselves have their thinking done for them by the people who control the mass media. Which is to say, democracy is the preferred system because it gives the political power to those who own or control the mass media and at the same time allows them to remain behind the scenes and evade responsibility for the way in which they use that power.

The media is so powerful.

Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.

I remain terrified of the capacity of the media, the capacity of spin doctors, here and abroad, particularly the United States media, to perpetuate false lies, perpetuate lies.

Television is something the Russians invented to destroy American education.