Gore Vidal Quotes

Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.

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

The press ... is but the servant of human intellect and its ministry is for good or evil, according to the character of those who direct it. The press is a mill that grinds all that is put into its hopper. Fill the hopper with poisoned grain and it will grind it to meal, but there is death in the bread.

The state must not ... let itself be confused by the drivel about so-called "freedom of the press," ... it must make sure of this instrument of popular education, and place it in the service of the state.

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

Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.

The greatest power of the mass media is the power to ignore. The worst thing about this power is that you may not even know you're using it.

The media—stenographers to power.

The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play.

If we turn to the war in Kosovo, what do we find? We find the manipulation of the audience's emotions by the mass media.

Increasingly, people have very little tolerance for anything that smacks of propaganda.

Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - 'indoctrination', we might say - exercised through the mass media.

Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.

The press is like a big bass, you just stick a hook in their mouth and they'll take it.

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

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

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

The most political decision you make is where you direct people's eyes. In other words, what you show people, day in and day out, is political...And the most politically indoctrinating thing you can do to a human being is to show him, every day, that there can be no change.

I was a victim of what most people are a victim of, which is really, really just gulping down what was being fed to me by the media.

The de facto censorship which leaves so many Americans functionally illiterate about the history of US foreign affairs may be all the more effective because it is not official, heavy-handed or conspiratorial, but woven artlessly into the fabric of education and media. No conspiracy is needed.

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

Today, the media dictatorship is becoming a substitute to military dictatorship. The big economic groups are using the media and decide who can speak, who the good guy is and who the bad guy is.

The media is either our salvation or our death.