Mass Media Quotes

“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”
― Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda

“The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.”
― Jess C. Scott, Literary Heroin (Gluttony): A Twilight Parody

“The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Constantly exposing yourself to popular culture and the mass media will ultimately shape your reality tunnel in ways that are not necessarily conducive to achieving your Soul Purpose and Life Calling. Modern society has generally ‘lost the plot’. Slavishly following its false gods and idols makes no sense in a spiritually aware life.”
― Anthon St. Maarten

“What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.”
― W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays

“[..]Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species."
Yes? Why is that?"
Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. [..]”
― Michael Crichton, The Lost World

“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“People sometimes imagine that just because they have access to so many newspapers, radio and TV channels, they will get an infinity of different opinions. Then they discover that things are just the opposite: the power of these loudspeakers only amplifies the opinion prevalent at a certain time, to the point where it covers any other opinion.”
― Amin Maalouf, The First Century After Beatrice

“Seemingly minor yet persistent things penetrate the mind over time making it difficult to ever realize the impact; hence, though quite unfortunate, the most dangerous forms of corruption are those that are subtle and below the radar.”
― Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile

“A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.”
― Umberto Eco, The Screen Education Reader

“Mass communication--wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued--presents us wit a serious daner, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in all the cities of the country. (p. 73)”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create

“The news is glorified gossip.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners to the mass media.

Well, it's all over. We have to start again from the beginning, asking one another what's going on.”
― Umberto Eco, Travels In Hyperreality

“There is a huge trapdoor waiting to open under anyone who is critical of so-called 'popular culture' or (to redefine this subject) anyone who is uneasy about the systematic, massified cretinization of the major media. If you denounce the excess coverage, you are yourself adding to the excess. If you show even a slight knowledge of the topic, you betray an interest in something that you wish to denounce as unimportant or irrelevant. Some writers try to have this both ways, by making their columns both 'relevant' and 'contemporary' while still manifesting their self-evident superiority. Thus—I paraphrase only slightly—'Even as we all obsess about Paris Hilton, the people of Darfur continue to die.' A pundit like (say) Bob Herbert would be utterly lost if he could not pull off such an apparently pleasing and brilliant 'irony.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“If you accept the existence of advertising, you accept a system designed to persuade and to dominate minds by interfering in people's thinking patterns. You also accept that the system will be used by the sorts of people who like to influence people and are good at it. No person who did not wish to dominate others would choose to use advertising, or choosing it, succeed in it. So the basic nature of advertising and all technologies created to serve it will be consistent with this purpose, will encourage this behaviour in society, and will tend to push social evolution in this direction.”
― Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

“pwede nga ring yung TV ang may sumpa. dahil ang TV, para ring drugs, pero ligal. isipin mo, bakit isa ito sa mga unang-unang ipinupundar ng mga Pilipino kahit gaano sila kahirap? kasi malaking tulong ang telebisyon para lumimot. para tumakas sa realidad. kahit mag-isa ka lang sa bahay, nababawasan ang lungkot kung may TV. nakakatanggal-buryong kung wala kang trabaho. mas entertaining kesa sa diyaryo, at mas accessible kesa sa sine. pwede rin itong tagapag-alaga ng mga anak mo. pwedeng ulam kung sakto lang ang budget pambili ng ng bigas. at pwedeng bintana kung parang bartolina lang ang tirahang tinutulugan ng mag-anak mo, dahil may magaganda itong lugar at magagandang tao. kumpleto sa sayawan, kantahan, tawanan, pantasya, at boksing. burado ang mga suliranin mo. pag sinuswerte ka, pwede ka pang manalo.”
― Bob Ong

“Efectul știrii este mai important decât adevărul ei.”
― Alexandru Bordian, Casa Inglezi

“[...] the institutional bias of the private mass media "does not merely protect the corporate system. It robs the public of a chance to understand the real world.”
― Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“Base your understanding of the world on data, rather than journalism.
Journalism is a highly non random sample of the worst things that have happened in any given period.

It is an availability machine, in the sense of Tversky and Kahneman's availability heuristic; namely - our sense of risk, danger and prevalence is driven by anecdotes, images and narratives that are available in memory.

A lot of good things are either things that "don't happen" (like a country at peace, or a city that has not been attacked by terrorists, which almost by definition are not news), or things that build up incrementally, a few percentage points a year, and then compound (like the decline of extreme poverty).

We can be unaware, out to lunch about what's happening in the world if we base our view on the news. If instead we base our view on data, then not only do we see that many (although not all) things have gone better (not linearly, not without setbacks and reversals, but in general a lot better... and that paradoxically, as I've cheekily put it, progressives hate progress), but also that the best possible case for progress - that is, for striving for more progress in the future, for being a true progressive - is not to have some kind of foolish hope, but to look at the fact that progress has taken place in the past; and that means: why should it stop now?”
― Steven Pinker

“The mass media first convinced us that the imaginary was real, and now they are convincing us that the real is imaginary; and the more reality the TV screen shows us, the more cinematic our everyday world becomes. Until, as certain philosophers have insisted, we will think that we are alone in the world, and that everything else is the film that God or some evil spirit is projecting before our eyes.”
― Umberto Eco, How to Travel With a Salmon & Other Essays

“Khalil Bendib is an equal-opportunity skewer. The more a subject or victim is ignored by the mass media, the more he infuriates, informs, and intensifies the reader's attention. Cartoons need to jolt. Bendib obliges page after page.”
― Ralph Nader

“We humans are pretty bad at knowing the truth. In fact, our brains suffer from so many distortions, omissions and biases that our perceptions can be completely at odds with reality.”
― Tom Albrighton, Copywriting Made Simple: How to write powerful and persuasive copy that sells

“Der Versuch, einen Film erschöpfend analysieren und interpretieren zu wollen, erweist sich als Illusion; es können nur Resultate erzielt werden dahingehend, dass die objektiv feststellbaren filmsprachlichen Elemente und Strukturen stärker als Mittel der Wahrnehmungslenkung, der bewussten Inszenierung und damit der gezielten Wirkung- und Bedeutungsschaffung zu interpretieren.”
― Alice Bienk

“Der Versuch, einen Film erschöpfend analysieren und interpretieren zu wollen, erweist sich als Illusion; es können nur Resultate erzielt werden dahingehend, dass die objektiv feststellbaren filmsprachlichen Elemente und Strukturen stärker als Mittel der Wahrnehmungslenkung, der bewussten Inszenierung und damit der gezielten Wirkungs- und Bedeutungsschaffung zu interpretieren.”
― Alice Bienk, Filmsprache – Einführung in die interaktive Filmanalyse

“Doomscrolling is nothing new, people used to do the same with tv remote, switching channel after channel, rarely settling on any one program. And heads buried in social media news feed is nothing new either - before smartphone and internet heads used to be buried in actual physical newspapers. Only the means have changed, not the habit. This is not advancement, it's recurring derangement. I'll call it progress when you put down your phone or remote and actually listen to another person. Sure, phones can be a supplement to organic conversation, but never a replacement.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science

“The media primarily gives the microphone to voices that toe the line — voices that keep the masses under tight control, like a sedative. And as we listen to these voices or read what they have to say, we don’t have to think much because they’re basically regurgitating a spiel that we’ve heard a million times before.”
― Vanessa de Largie

“You cannot think of relatives, friends, neighbors, colleagues, acquaintances, as masses... Masses are other people.”
― Raymond Williams, Culture And Society 1780-1950

“Democrația a devenit o armă a intereselor băneşti. Ea folosește mass-media pentru a crea iluzia că există consimțământul celor guvernați. Presa de astăzi este o armată cu arme atent organizate, jurnaliştii fiind ofițerii ei, iar cititorii, soldații. Cititorul nu ştie şi nici nu trebuie să cunoască scopurile pentru care este folosit şi rolul pe care trebuie să-l joace.
Noţiunea de democrație adesea nu diferă cu nimic de a trăi sub o plutocrație sau sub o guvernare a elitelor bogate.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

“That constitutes a chastening reminder for someone like myself, with a bias in favor of the written page and a sour prejudice against mass-market video: a reminder that, although images can be deceptive, they don't stand convicted alone. Writing is just another form of concoction. Words can lie too. You can trust me on this, probably.”
― David Quammen, Wild Thoughts from Wild Places