James Montgomery Beck Quotes

Ever since Gutenberg, every dynasty, every political leader, every major religion, has recognized that to control the media is to have a powerful instrument for controlling the values and behavior of a population.

Today the greatest evil—and therefore the most immediate—is the press.

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.

Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.

In the last James Bond movie, the villain was a culture captain, a tycoon of culture, a Murdoch figure. It's not as if people don't know what is going on.

It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.

Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.

It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.

Politicians are masters of the art of deception.

Power in America today is control of the means of communication.

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.

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 American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

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

The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power.

Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil.

There is one other business where the customer is always wrong and that's the media.

I'm not for one second condoning the actions of terrorists at all, but I do think there's a kind of terrorism that the media carries out on its own citizens, certainly in this country - and it's fear.

It is really the angling in the media that I do not like. That is how media can be rotten.

The right-wing wants to destroy all the media and replace it with their propaganda.

Those in power always try to distort reality, to suit their needs and keep things safe.

It's not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.

I don't think 'Citizen Kane' stands more than one watch. Power corrupts. Who didn't know that?

I fear three newspapers more than a hundred thousand bayonets.