Tim Reid Quotes

Entertainment is one of America's greatest exports. And the stories that we tell about people inform the world about how to think about people.

What we view in the media - and who presents it to us - does so much to determine how we think, how we feel about ourselves, and how we view the world.

If I turn on the television, am I to believe that that is America? I'm sorry, I don't believe that's America.

Whoopi Goldberg looked like me, she had hair like mine, she was dark like me. I'd been starved for images of myself. I'd grown up watching a lot of American TV. There was very little Kenyan material, because we had an autocratic ruler who stifled our creative expression.

I was a journalist when I made 'I'm British But...' I'd seen how important the media was in terms of defining Indians - after the riots in the '80s, I was like, 'Oh my God!'

Which suggests something about media and war: it's not just that events happen and the media documents and presents them. There is a third element: what the public is ready to accept, what the public wants to know.

I'm convinced that there's a new way to define capitalism, and that the definition should include three ingredients - that we love our work, that we are building a traditionally successful business, and that we are having some positive impact in the world, whether it's local or global.

I think at a certain point actors need to start taking responsibility for the kinds of stories they want to tell.

The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages.

The irony of the media and people in big cities is that they're charged with defining the entire culture, when in reality they don't even live in that culture. They live in such a rarified, tiny world.

In Modernism, reality used to validate media. In Postmodernism, the media validate reality. If you don't believe this, just think how many times you've described some real event as being 'just like a movie.'

Museums are managers of consciousness. They give us an interpretation of history, of how to view the world and locate ourselves in it. They are, if you want to put it in positive terms, great educational institutions. If you want to put it in negative terms, they are propaganda machines.

I don't think liberals in the media are really that much different from liberals outside the media.

The media doesn't create narratives, really. They're not that powerful. What they do is they tap into narratives that are already bubbling amongst their viewership or readership.

Television is the medium through which society communicates its democratic values.

The fact that television is raising our moral conscience is a good thing.

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

Media creates awareness [and] ensures transparency and accountability.

How is it that the country that invented Hollywood and Madison Avenue allowed such a destructive and parodied image of itself to become the intellectual coin of the realm overseas?

A culture is made — or destroyed — by its articulate voices.

I'd be so fascinated to talk to a psychologist or sociologist about the deep psychological impact of seeing oneself represented. I don't think we've really touched the surface of what it does to the psyche of a people if the only image of you out there is negative. Or if it's never out there.

I don't think I even have a clear perspective of how I'm depicted in the media.

Culture is this thing that exists apart from our real life but is something we all have tacitly agreed to in America. And what film and television do, particularly in this country, is lay out the characters involved in this invisible agreement and dictate who and what can participate.

A people without a positive history is like a vehicle without an engine.

I think the media could be a very good force for good, and I think Hollywood can, as well.