Media Purpose Quotes

It's important to remember that, first and foremost, if not only, this is entertainment. 'The West Wing' isn't meant to be good for you.

I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information.

This instrument [radio] can teach. It can illuminate, yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it's nothing but wires and lights in a box.

To see, and to show, is the mission now undertaken by Life.

The idea that media is there to educate us, or to inform us, is ridiculous because that's about tenth or eleventh on their list.

My philosophy as a filmmaker is to inform and entertain at the same time. And when I went away from documentaries into miniseries like 'Roots,' I did the reverse. Instead of just entertaining, I want to inform at the same time.

Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union.

Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.

I just want to open up the avenues for people to express themselves. That's what the media ought to be. It shouldn't just be a conveyer belt of shiny products to buy. It should be a way that we're all communicating and understanding each other.

Public Broadcasting System an entity designed to create an informed citizenry rather than to deliver consumers to advertisers.

I think the media has to continually remind itself, and I think we do but sometimes not well enough that we're not just an economic property.

Journalism seems to have recovered its reason for being.

It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising chatter.

At the end of the day, broadcast television has many opportunities to inform the audience, to enlighten the audience, and to entertain them.

I would wish eventually to be able to make television that informs and educates as well as entertains.

Writers and reporters need to remind themselves they're not to be judged solely by the number of clicks or eyeballs on a given story, but there is this other value and this other important mission, and the key is balancing the two so that you stay alive long enough, whether you're an individual writer or whether you're a whole news organization, to keep doing what you're doing but that you don't get so driven by that that you forget that what you're supposed to be doing in a higher sense is informing people, is elevating the debate and not lowering it.

The newspaper offers something very different from Google's aggregators. It offers a value system, an idea of what matters in the world. Newspapers need to start articulating that value.

The media tries to do what they do. You can't stop. You gotta get money.

I don't see making films to entertain and making films to inform as separate things.

In the networks' endless pursuit of controversy, we should ask what is the end value ... to enlighten or to profit? What is the end result ... to inform or to confuse? How does the ongoing exploration for more action, more excitements, more drama, serve our national search for internal peace and stability.