Public Opinion Manipulation Quotes

When I talk about the polling, I'm talking about the principles. It shows these officials are knowingly attempting to shift public opinion, even though they know what they say is not factual.

I fear three newspapers more than a hundred thousand bayonets.

The art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it. Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called, by a shot-gun marriage of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are complementary, and both of them are degrading to their practitioners. The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself.

I think everyone's kind of just whistling and pretending everything's OK. At the heart of this is the cover-up, and the misleading the country to war in Iraq. And quite honestly, I don't think Republicans actually did a particularly good or sophisticated job, but I think everybody wanted to be fooled. I remember being on the Bill Maher show talking about how ridiculous this was before the invasion. And, you know, a lot of people, even Democrats, had been so easily thrown into this fear frenzy that they lost common sense.

If you don't donate to Obama and you're a major corporation like Big Oil, then they're gonna blame you for climate change, destroying the planet and they're gonna get everybody turned against you and hating your guts and so forth, and that's how they operate. That's not how Trump operates. That's not how Mike Pence operates. They understand the simple mathematics of economics.

Chinese central government doesn't need to even lead public opinion: it just selectively stops censorship. In other words, just as censorship is a political tool, so is the absence of censorship.

Let's face it, Fox News, you'll miss me when I'm gone. It'll be harder to convince the public that Hillary Clinton was born in Kenya.

Perhaps if we could popularise through the techniques of branding and consumerism, a different idea, a different narrative, perhaps the world can change. After all it changes constantly and incessantly, it's just the perceptions that we have are governed by people with self-interest and are not inalignment with the health and safety of us as individuals or as a planet.

All it takes to get elected in twenty-first-century America is a mob of frightened sheep and a wolf with a nice smile.

To whom should propaganda be addressed? To the scientifically trained intelligentsia or the less educated masses? It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses.

To attract people, to win over people to that which I have realized as being true, that is called propaganda.

No less a philosopher than Chief Justice Burger was outraged by Ellsberg's publication of classified documents. They belonged to the Government, Burger reasoned, and Ellsberg had no more right to give them to the people than he would have to filch another man's property off a taxicab seat. The Government, of course, commonly leaks classified documents when it deems publication convenient to manipulate public opinion to its advantage. Only the Government, it seems, has a legal right to manipulate opinion with hot documents.

The media, itself an arm of mega-corporate power, feeds the fear industry, so that people are primed like pumps to support wars on rumor, innuendo, legends, and lies.

You would be surprised how effective, at least for influencing low-information voters, negative propaganda about me is.

The art of manipulating public opinion, which is a necessary art for the democratic politician, and, like other arts, is sometimespractised with greater virtuosity by knaves than by honest men (who are apt to disdain it), has a different technique in different countries. For instance, in England we excel in whitewashing: in America they excel in tarring and feathering. We strain our nerves and stretch our consciences to avoid a scandal: Americans do the same to make one.

I created hoaxes. I confronted and challenged the majority opinion. I attacked, humiliated, and criticized the voice of the corporate mainstream media.

The news pages are now routinely the site of the rankest propaganda.

As problems have grown more complex, leaders have struggled to find the language to discuss them clearly, credibly and at the right emotional amplitude. Nonplussed and tongue-tied, politicians give themselves over to message gurus … who peddle the notion that poll-tested words — honed and targeted with scientific precision — can pick the lock of public opinion.

Democracy, taken in its narrower, purely political, sense, suffers from the fact that those in economic and political power possess the means for molding public opinion to serve their own class interests. The democratic form of government in itself does not automatically solve problems; it offers, however, a useful framework for their solution. Everything depends ultimately on the political and moral qualities of the citizenry.

The greatest threat facing American today - next to voter fraud, the Western Pinebark beetle, and the memory foam mattress - is the national news media.

Far from being reluctantly propelled into hostilities by popular war fever, leaders incite that fever in order to gather support for their war policies. Thereby do they attempt to distract the public from pressing domestic matters, serve the overseas interests of U.S. investors, justify gargantuan military budgets, and present themselves as great leaders.

Fox opposes a Syria peace plan because its modus operandi is to foment dissent in the form of a relentless and irrational contrarianism to Barack Obama and all things Democratic, to advance its ultimate objective of creating a deliberately misinformed body politic whose fear, anger, mistrust, and discontent is the manna upon which it sustains its parasitic succubus-like existence.

For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America's defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.

It's easier to make negative attacks and simplistic slogans [in social media] than it is to communicate complex policies.