Mass Media Quotes

“Let's face it. We live in a command-based system, where we have been programmed since our earliest school years to become followers, not individuals. We have been conditioned to embrace teams, the herd, the masses, popular opinion -- and to reject what is different, eccentric or stands alone. We are so programmed that all it takes for any business or authority to condition our minds to follow or buy something is to simply repeat a statement more than three or four times until we repeat it ourselves and follow it as truth or the best trendiest thing. This is called "programming" -- the frequent repetition of words to condition us how to think, what to like or dislike, and who to follow.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Most of the time, we see only what we want to see, or what others tell us to see, instead of really investigate to see what is really there. We embrace illusions only because we are presented with the illusion that they are embraced by the majority. When in truth, they only become popular because they are pounded at us by the media with such an intensity and high level of repetition that its mere force disguises lies and truths. And like obedient schoolchildren, we do not question their validity and swallow everything up like medicine. Why? Because since the earliest days of our youth, we have been conditioned to accept that the direction of the herd, and authority anywhere — is always right.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Understanding knowledge as an essential element of love is vital because we are bombarded daily with messages that tell us love is about mystery, about that which cannot be known. We see movies in which people are represented as being in love who never talk with one another, who fall into bed without ever discussing their bodies, their sexual needs, their likes and dislikes. Indeed, the message is received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance that gives love its erotic and transgressive edge. These messages are brought to us by profiteering producers who have no clue about the art of loving, who substitute their mystified visions because they do not really know how to genuinely portray loving interaction.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“The death of a billionaire is worth more to the media than the lives of a billion poor people.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The culture industry is not the art of the consumer but rather the projection of the will of those in control onto their victims. The automatic self-reproduction of the status quo in its established forms is itself an expression of domination.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry

“Our capacity as human beings for imagination and storytelling makes us exquisitely vulnerable to exploitation by those who understand the properties of ideological power.”
― David Smail, Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress

“Even though some individual scholars try to tell us there is no direct connection between images of violence and the violence confronting us in our lives, the commonsense truth remains- we are affected by the images we consume and by the states of mind we are in when watching them. If consumers want to be entertained, and the images shown us as entertaining are images of violent dehumanization, it makes sense that these acts become more acceptable in our daily lives and that we become less likely to respond to them with moral outrage or concern. Were we all seeing more images of loving human interaction, it would undoubtedly have a positive impact on our lives.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Say what you wish about media in the Arab world, but say it knowing that no media channel in the world is absolutely free.”
― Aysha Taryam

“Those who rule have always had an interest in shaping the perceptions of those they wish to rule. But never in the history of humanity has their toolbox been so full. Advances in technology and psychology have enabled the messages of the rulers to permeate our consciousness to a degree no prior society could have imagined.”
― James Rozoff

“You follow voice of masses, Possibly you suppress your inner voice.”
― Bikash Bhandari

“Sería muy interesante que alguien investigara en qué medida los sistemas de comunicación de masas trabajan al servicios de la información y hasta qué punto al servicio del silencio. ¿Qué abunda más, lo que se dice o lo que se calla?”
― Ryszard Kapuściński

“In actual fact it would seem that during the Cold War, if not during World War II, this country has become frankly a warfare state built on affluence, a power structure in which the interests of big business, the obsessions of the military, and the phobias of political extremists both dominate and dictate our national policy. It also seems that the people of the country are by and large reduced to passivity, confusion, resentment, frustration, thoughtlessness and ignorance, so that they blindly follow any line that is unraveled for them by the mass media.”
― Thomas Merton, Cold War Letters

“The media’s so central to our lives that we believe what we see onscreen is real. In fact, it’s more real than reality: emotions are heightened, drama sharpened, issues simplified.”
― Steve Shahbazian, Green and Pleasant Land

“It doesn’t matter whether it’s true, only that it’s believable.”
― Steve Shahbazian, Green and Pleasant Land

“[...] 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

“Get used to the idea of significant portion of the population walking around with high-speed Internet connections on their person, with sophisticated video cameras built in. They will be shooting all kinds of events all the time. Crime. Crashes. Speeches. Sports. And the footage won't be the short, sanitized and safe versions we usually see on television, courtesy of the old media gatekeepers. The user-generated pictures and video will be raw and real. It will be disturbing, yet illuminating. And it will be shared over the 'Net almost as it happens, and available for everyone to see.”
― Ian Lamont

“Imagine a hundred million people clicking polls and typing in their favorite TV shows and products and political leanings, day after day. It’s the biggest data profile ever. And it’s voluntary. That’s the funny part. People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they’ll spend all day telling you who they are.”
― Max Barry, Lexicon

“The message received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance that gives love its erotic and transgressive edge.”
― bell hooks

“Journalists are not entertainers. We are reporters. We go to places that are unpopular. We broadcast voices that are controversial. We are not here to win popularity contests. We are here to cover the issues critical to a democratic society. We have to pressure the media, to shame the media into going into these forgotten places where so many are sent to waste away in silence.”
― Amy Goodman, The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them

“More and more people are saying 'no' to government lies, corporate greed, and a slavish media.

The silenced majority is finding its voice.”
― Amy Goodman, The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them

“Value system also comes from the mass media of the land.”
― Sunday Adelaja

“Then, back in our room, I turn on the television for a moment. There, children. The children are thin, exhausted, without the strength to wave away the flies walking about on their faces. Vera says to me: "Aren't there any old people
dying in that country as well?" No, no, what was so interesting about that famine, what made it unique among the millions of famines that have occurred on this earth, was that it cut down only children. We never saw an adult suffering on the screen, even though we watched the news every day, precisely to confirm that unprecedented fact.”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness

“Only when the media shines a spotlight can people know and decide whether to act.”
― Amy Goodman, The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them

“The function of hegemony is to transform ideology into culture, into a "world view" that is seen as "normal" and "natural" by everyone from the controlling classes to the subordinate classes. Today, the major means of establishing the hegemony are the mass media.”
― Rupert Woodfin, Marxism: A Graphic Guide

“La presse, si bavarde dans l'affaire des rats, ne parlait plus de rien. C'est que les rats meurent dans la rue et les hommes dans leur chambre. Et les journaux ne s'occupent que de la rue. (The press, so talkative in the case of the rats, were no longer speaking of anything. That's because rats die in the street and people die in their rooms. And the newspapers are only interested in the street.)”
― Albert Camus, La Peste d'Albert Camus

“Some people refuse to acknowledge someone’s greatness while that person is still broke or alive, or not educated, rich, or famous.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“I’d rather listen to the ramblings of a drunkard than get myself engrossed with the media and its appalling news.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes

“Posterity does not accept half measures. If you don't want to be treated like an idiot mass, you don't have to behave like one.”
― Byron Rizzo, Polypticon, Part I: The Joint Political-Informatic Effort Project

“Wikipedia: Character Assasination

The effect of a character assassination driven by an individual is not equal to that of a state-driven campaign. The state-sponsored destruction of reputations, fostered by political propaganda and cultural mechanisms, can have more far-reaching consequences. One of the earliest signs of a society's compliance to loosening the reins on the perpetration of crimes (and even massacres) with total impunity is when a government favors or directly encourages a campaign aimed at destroying the dignity and reputation of its adversaries, and the public accepts its allegations without question. The mobilization toward ruining the reputation of adversaries is the prelude to the mobilization of violence in order to annihilate them. Generally, official dehumanization has preceded the physical assault of the victims.

Specific examples include Zersetzung, by the Stasi secret service agency of East Germany, and kompromat in Russia.”
― Wikipedia Contributors

“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