A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.
Belief is with them mechanical, voluntary: they believe what they are paid for — they swear to that which turns to account. Do you suppose, that after years spent in this manner, they have any feeling left answering to the difference between truth and falsehood?
Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.
Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.
For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.
Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.
I almost wish I could be more exciting, that I could match what is happening out there to me.
I can get a better grasp of what is going on in the world from one good Washington dinner party than from all the background information NBC piles on my desk.
I sometimes compare press officers to riflemen on the Somme — mowing down wave upon wave of distortion, taking out rank upon rank of supposition, deduction and gossip.
I think that in the minds of many, the press is being seen less and less as a neutral observer in the impeachment enterprise and more and more as participants, or even collaborators. [On Media's Participation In Watergate]
If I use the media, even with tricks, to publicize a black youth being shot in the back in Teaneck, New Jersey… then I should be praised for it, and it's more of a comment on them than me that it would take tricks to make them cover the loss of life.
If the sexual revolution has been a medical disaster, socially it has been a catastrophe. Why do the media not report and explore the tragic results of the sexual revolution? Because many are collaborators.
If Thomas Edison invented electric light today, Dan Rather would report it on CBS News as, ''Candle making industry threatened''.
If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish into it.
In old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.
It is a misfortune that necessity has induced men to accord greater license to this formidable engine, in order to obtain liberty, than can be borne with less important objects in view; for the press, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.
It is impossible to read the daily press without being diverted from reality. You are full of enthusiasm for the eternal verities — life is worth living, and then out of sinful curiosity you open a newspaper. You are disillusioned and wrecked.
It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.
Media, the plural of mediocrity.