The Media Quotes

The question is the propriety of how we go about influencing and changing behavior.

There are a lot of ways to practice the art of journalism, and one of them is to use your art like a hammer to destroy the right people — who are almost always your enemies, for one reason or another, and who usually deserve to be crippled, because they are wrong. This is a dangerous notion, and very few professional journalists will endorse it — calling it "vengeful" and "primitive" and "perverse" regardless of how often they might do the same thing themselves. "That kind of stuff is opinion," they say, "and the reader is cheated if it's not labelled as opinion." Well, maybe so. Maybe Tom Paine cheated his readers and Mark Twain was a devious fraud with no morals at all who used journalism for his own foul ends. And maybe H. L. Mencken should have been locked up for trying to pass off his opinions on gullible readers and normal "objective journalism." Mencken understood that politics — as used in journalism — was the art of controlling his environment, and he made no apologies for it. In my case, using what politely might be called "advocacy journalism," I've used reporting as a weapon to affect political situations that bear down on my environment.

Socialists have infiltrated our schools, our law courts, our government, our MEDIA OF COMMUNICATIONS. ... the Socialist movement is made up of a relatively small number of people who have developed the TECHNIQUE OF INFLUENCING large masses of people to a VERY HIGH DEGREE

Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.

The palest ink is better than the best memory.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.

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.

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.

Give people control of the media and they will use it. Don’t give them control and you will lose it.

The media is a like any other group of people. Their universe is all that matters.

I don't care what people are saying about me, good or bad, in blogs or on Twitter or in the media. There will always be people who don't like you and don't like your books. Ignore them.

Whoever controls the media—the images—controls the culture.

… the thug is aware that loudness convinces 60 persons where reasoning convinces but one..

Some degree of abuse is inseparable from the proper use of every thing; and in no instance is this more true than in that of the press. It has accordingly been decided, by the practice of the states, that it is better to leave a few of its noxious branches to their luxuriant growth, than, by pruning them away, to injure the vigor of those yielding the proper fruits. And can the wisdom of this policy be doubted by any one who reflects that to the press alone, checkered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression?

Hunker down like a jackass in a hail storm and wait till the wind stops blowing.

A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both ... And a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives.

The press must grow day in and day out — it is our Party's sharpest and most powerful weapon.

When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property.

When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.

I don’t care if you fuck the elephants, but if you do, you can’t cover the circus.

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.

Critics have their uses. They can crystallize a moment and bring into sharp relief the mistakes that have been made and what must be done to correct them.

All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake “public opinion” for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.

The media increase the political nastiness while distancing voters from those clashes. Citizens become spectators. ­Headline-­driven news emphasizes the extremes, the fights, the hysteria, the sensational. Political reporters, trying to appear objective by quoting two opposing sides to almost every story, mostly sharpen the differences, slighting any centrist position.