Ethan Zuckerman Quotes

As someone from a developing country, I have a problem with rich countries thinking they can tell us anything, simply because they are giving money.

The media is not at all homogeneous in the way it tells us about war.

It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in the view of Africa from the American media, in which we are shown poverty and conflicts without any context.

The lack of equity and of a sense of solidarity in international transactions works to the advantage of the industrialized nations so that the gulf between the rich and the poor is ever widening. Hence derives the feeling of frustration among third world countries, and the accusations of exploitation and economic colonialism brought against the industrialized nations.

Quite a few people who are in the media and in control of the big money seem to want to see these Southeast Asian countries - and, in particular, Malaysia - stop trying to catch up with their superiors and to know their place.

We in politics are accustomed to seeing reality firsthand and then watching its distant cousin, events as portrayed by the media, unfold on our televisions. We know that what happened in Congress and what is reported to have taken place are two very different things. But that disjuncture, so familiar to politicians, is new to the viewing public. By seeing war and war coverage juxtaposed nightly on their screens, Americans have learned the crucial lesson: not to trust the news anchors.

We in the West must bear in mind that the poor countries are poor primarily because we have exploited them through political or economic colonialism.

For some members of the radical Left, particularly in the West, people in developing countries are an ideological abstraction, on whom fantasies of liberation are projected from a comfortable distance.

In the press, there's this desire for the black audience to be this monolithic thing that always responds to the same stars. That's a really reductive way of looking at the black audience.

I get it that the media is going to show the worst part, because that's the part that people want to see. But they have not represented Israel or Palestine, however people want to call it, they haven't represented it well at all. Go to the beach! You won't know this place from California.

I believe the conservatives need to push back against the ungrateful habit of blaming the West by pointing repeatedly to the self-inflicted wounds of the Third World.

I think the media has portrayed conservatives as these cold, heartless people who want poor people to die and let half the population starve and all this. They've done that so effectively because they've owned the narrative for so long.

Let's be real: dads get a bad rap in the media. We're talking Vanilla Ice's 'Ninja Rap' bad. More often than not, they're either pop lockin' Soul Train-style after learning they aren't the father, or they're selfish man-children who have more toys than brain cells.

I don't think you can have any actual idea of what the Royal Family are really like from how they are portrayed in the papers.

You think we got it bad in Omaha, or in any city in the United States, and then you go to a different country and you see how bad they got it. You give those people a balloon and they'll cherish it like you gave them a chunk of gold.

Don't ever believe what you see in films.

Most of the things I read from journalists are, you know, a little bit simplified and easy.

I do not believe so many Turks suspect my activities. The idea that this movement of volunteers is suspected by many Turks arises in the same way and for the same reasons that the world hears more about those Muslims whom the media call radicals. Since those who give this impression are extremely loud, some observers can be deceived.

The so-called positive press has in some ways been more difficult to swallow than the negative.

I think a lot of the media love the game and hate the people who play it.

David Simon [the creator of The Wire] and I have a running controversy for years. It all stems from a telephone call I made to KPFA [Pacifica radio] when he was a guest there in the 90's on Chris Welche's show. He was going around the country with a Black kid from the Ghetto to promote something called The Corner - it was all about Blacks as degenerates selling drugs, etc.

The Republicans have never had, in their story - conservatives, either, have never had... I'm talking this in a media context, now. They've never had an agenda or a story that the media would like them to have.

I used to believe that we could change the media. I was as naive as anybody.

The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.

Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people. But they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.