Information distortion Quotes

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion.

The media doesn't always reflect reality.

The media, famously called the marketplace of ideas, is a failed market when a strong interest faces no like interest to generate competing ideas.

Today we live in a world now where it is easy to confuse truth and popularity. And you can use money to amplify whatever you believe and get people to believe what is popular is now truthful. And what is not popular may not be truthful.

The attempts to distort the truth and to hide the facts behind blanket accusations have been undertaken at all stages of the Ukrainian crisis.

The deliberate introduction of distortion and fuzziness to improve the competitive position of one's own agency or division is an unavoidable and dominant feature of the bureaucratic landscape

When the President starts lying he begins to need evidence to back up his lies because in this democracy he is questioned on his statements. It then percolates down through the bureaucracy that you are helping the Boss if you come up with evidence that is supportive of our public position and you are distinctly unhelpful if you commit to paper statements that might leak to the wrong people. The effect of that is to poison the flow of information to the President himself and to create a situation where a President can be almost, to use a metaphor, psychotically divorced from the realities in which he is acting....

The media do strange things.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

Letting the facts speak for themselves is an immoral principle when we all know that facts and figures can be selected to prove anything.

TV serves us most usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse - news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion.

I am fascinated by these ocean-grown folks. On the coast, there's all this cross-pollination of ideas. Someone thinks they saw something. One person's madness is reiterated by another, and a story is born. The rumour becomes a substitute for news.

The media no longer ask those who know something to share that knowledge with the public. Instead they ask those who know nothing to represent the ignorance of the public and, in so doing, to legitimate it.

News and entertainment are getting dangerously intertwined.

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

Misinformation is a virus unto itself. And Fox News is the vector.

It's unfortunate people can twist and turn things to fit whatever narrative they'd like it to fit.

No longer is there a quest for the truth so much as there is this apparent need to present both sides of an issue even if one is nothing but lies and distortions.

I think a lot of things get blown out of proportion in the media.

The cable news channels have cleverly seized on the creed of objectivity and redefined it in populist terms. They attack news based on verifiable fact for its liberal bias, for, in essence, failing to be objective, and promise a return to genuine objectivity.

The media can't get anything straight.

Nobody will keep the thing he hears to himself, and nobody will repeat just what he hears and no more.

The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to oversimplify complex matters. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth.

Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.

I have to remind myself - I think the population of the United States has been subjected to the most sophisticated form of propaganda and mind control that any group of people has been exposed to in a very, very long time. It's difficult for people in this country to get any kind of factual information and to make intelligent decisions based on them.