Edward R. Murrow Quotes

I don't read the press, I don't watch endless music TV.

We aren't in an information age, we are in an entertainment age.

The media are not progressive enough to let us govern. 24/7 news is the worst thing that has happened to the ability to govern.

The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

If it doesn’t happen on television, it doesn’t happen.

I was told that television will be very difficult. But I think everyone just hypes it.

There's so much to consume that it's very easy to read a headline in the news outlets that you subscribe to that you maybe support and go 'This is how I feel.'

The second the news comes on TV, people turn it off or tune it out. People don't want to hear the other side.

Speed as a drug disorganizes the personality; speed as the goal of information dissemination commits a subtler crime. People are mainlining our words. We rarely read of the rational alternatives, only of the commands that all must change or else. This is a prescription for public panic.

The media know exactly what they're doing, focusing our attention on Arsenio's hairdo. We need to keep our brains brimming with rubbish. If we didn't, we might think about things.

I think that we live in a world - and this is something which living in Pakistan, perhaps, has taught me - and, you know, we live in a world where there is a constant feed from social media, the news, etc., of things that can scare us. And we become so anxious because human beings are meant - are designed to be sensitized to dangerous stuff.

The media, far from being a conspiracy to dull the political sense of the people, could be viewed as a conspiracy to disguise the extent of political indifference.

In a personalized world, important but complex or unpleasant issues are less likely to come to our attention at all.

The evening papers print what they do and get away with it because by afternoon the human mind is ruined anyhow.

The world is for thousands a freak show; the images flicker past and vanish; the impressions remain flat and unconnected in the soul. Thus they are easily led by the opinions of others, are content to let their impressions be shuffled and rearranged and evaluated differently.

There's always going to be - I don't care who it is, there's always going to be - the temptation in Washington to seek the favor of the leftist media. It's always gonna be there, no matter who it is. I can only think of one exception, and that's Reagan. It's the rule rather than the exception.

Trump has his own audience, which is in many cases as big as or bigger than the media covering him. He doesn't need the media. He enjoys them being around. He likes toying with them. He likes being provocative around them. To him, the media is a plaything. To the Republican and Democrat establishments, the media holds coequal position in the entire power structure of the ruling class.

The most powerful weapon deployed by the Clintons is the corporate media, the press.

Big media are all about the angle, the spin. Look to the overarching theme that runs through each and every news story. Be hip to the meta-narrative peddled.

I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage. Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.

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

Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others. It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.

It is all too easy for the liberal media to stir up the irrational hatreds of millions of people, who see themselves as less fortunate than others, by repeatedly talking about eh billions of dollars in 'windfall profits' earned by major corporations, by featuring periodic stories on the opulent living of wealthy individuals, or by pointing an accusing finger at 'loopholes' used by 'the rich.'

Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen. [...] Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.

(The mainstream media) are so vested in our first black president not being a failure that it's going to be amazing to watch the lengths they go to to protect him. They, I believe, will spout this racist line if some of their colleagues up here aren't doing it aggressively enough. There is going to be a real desperation.