Media Control Quotes:

"The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent. "Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions..." Gore Vidal
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"Following the same course that virtually every other major industry has in the last two decades, a relentless series of mergers and corporate takeovers has consolidated control of the media into the hands of a few corporate behemoths. "The result has been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to the American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state." David McGowan
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"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.": Mark Twain The Mysterious Stranger 1916.
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"I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy" A. J. Liebling
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"There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press" Mark Twain
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"If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free" Franklin D. Roosevelt
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"The press is our chief ideological weapon" Nikita Khrushchev
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"Perhaps the most obvious political effect of controlled news is the advantage it gives powerful people in getting their issues on the political agenda and defining those issues in ways likely to influence their resolution.": W. Lance Bennett - Author, professor at University of Washington Source: News: The Politics of Illusion, 1983
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The current moguls understand that true media power lies not in firing up our outrage, as Hearst did, but in befuddling it or tranquilizing it with new toys. The idea is to render us passive so that they can exercise their power to sell us a bunch of stuff we mostly don't need and mostly don't want.: Richard Schickel - Brill's Content, July/August 2000, p. 122
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“Hollywood, land of fiction and history revisionism wouldn’t produce a product of truth even if it was profitable; neither would its kissing cousins, the media and the publishing industry.”
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" The purpose of commercial [media] is to induce mass sales. For mass sales there must be a mass norm ... By suppressing the individual, the unique, the industry ... assures itself a standard product for mass consumption.": John Whiting, writer, commenting on the homogenization of corporate media program content
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"In the United States, both the Republican and Democratic Parties, with only a few prominent exceptions, have been and are in the pay of the corporate media and communication giants." John Nichols and Robert McChesney
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"Media manipulation in the U.S. today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany, because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the information we want. That misconception prevents people from even looking for the truth." - Mark Crispin Miller
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"Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your HONOR. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse." --Mark Twain.
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"A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself." - Joseph Pulitzer
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It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper" - - Rod Serling
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"When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic." Dresden James.
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"To become informed and hold government accountable, the general public needs to obtain news that is comprehensive yet interesting and understandable, that conveys facts and outcomes, not cosmetic images and airy promises. But that is not what the public demands." - Eric Alterman
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"The media want to maintain their intimate relation to state power. They want to get leaks, they want to get invited to the press conferences. They want to rub shoulders with the Secretary of State, all that kind of business. To do that, you've got to play the game, and playing the game means telling their lies, serving as their disinformation apparatus." - Noam Chomsky
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Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech, all of the outward forms and structures of free institutions are a sham, a pretense -- the sheerest mockery. If the press is not free; if speech is not independent and untrammeled; if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and not a citizen: William E. Borah
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If you think there is freedom of the press in the United States, I tell you there is no freedom of the press... They come out with the cheap shot. The press should be ashamed of itself. They should come to both sides of the issue and hear both sides and let the American people make up their minds: Bill Moyers
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Protection against government is now not enough to guarantee that a man who has something to say shall have a chance to say it. The owners and managers of the press determine which person, which facts, which version of the facts, and which ideas shall reach the public: Commission On Freedom Of The Press
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"To preserve the freedom of the human mind... and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement." Thomas Jefferson to William Green Munford, 1799.
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"There is no such thing in America as an independent press, unless it is in the country towns. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to writes (sic) his honest opinions, and if you did you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid one hundred and fifty dollars a week for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with--others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things--and any of you who would be so foolish as to write his honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.
The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread. You know this and I know it, and what folly is this to be toasting an "Independent Press."
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"Whoever controls the media, controls the peoples' minds."
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"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly...it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over." Joseph Goebbels , Nazi Propaganda Minister (As in "George Bush and his Neocons?")
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The foulest damage to our political life comes not from the 'secrets' which they hide from us, but from the little bits of half-truth and disinformation which they do tell us. These are already pre-digested, and then are sicked up as little gobbits of authorised spew. The columns of defence correspondents in the establishment sheets serve as the spittoons. - E. P. Thompson, British historian
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"How did Jews manage to take control of virtually all major media in the United States? If it was Moslems, we'd be up in arms. What gives?"
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"The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary.": George Orwell in the book 1984
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"Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter": Erich Fromm, psychoanalyst and social philosopher, 1900-1980
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"The result has been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to the American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state." David McGowan
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"With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter's definition of the situation, into performing harsh acts. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority." Stanley Milgram , 1965 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Milgram

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"I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy": A. J. Liebling
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"There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press." Mark Twain
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"If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free." Franklin D. Roosevelt
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"The press is our chief ideological weapon." Nikita Khrushchev (The press is America's Fascists chief idealogical weapon also.)

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