Mass Media Quotes

“What happened to truth? Did it go out of style?”
― Michael Jackson, Moonwalk

“Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline!”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The more hideous the mental contortions, the greater the delight and bravos of the mass.”
― Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays

“Our system was not set up to for the government to be able to do with a man's kingdom what they want. It was set up to protect that man's kingdom, to allow him to feel that his borders, no matter how great or small, would always be secure and that he would always be allowed to defend them. The Supreme Court took that right away with their eminent domain ruling back in 2005. The governments have taken advantage of that eminent domain ruling, and you, the media, have failed at protecting citizens.”
― Tit Elingtin, Eminent Domain

“You could have done something with newspapers. We didn't do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newspapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about cases of indecent assault, and no Government was wise enough to stop us having them that way. But something might have been done with newspapers, if we'd been wise enough.”
― Nevil Shute, On the Beach

“To see what they look like, women look at a mirror. To look like what they see, women read magazines.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Between Monday and Saturday men make an audience. On Sunday, they make a congregation.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Algunos analistas de medios de comunicación han advertido que en los informativos de hoy en día no se comprueba nada de nada. <>, afirma un periodista. Otro colega ha opinado, a condición de que no se revele su identidad: <>.”
― Michael Crichton, Next

“[A] new finding shows that while in the 1940s, three-quarters of those surveyed claimed to dream in black and white, today, three-quarters say the opposite, that they dream in color. This reversal is attributed to a change in the number of people who grew up watching color rather than black and white television... another hint that our private dreams are intimately linked to our collective mediated experiences.”
― Katherine A. Fowkes, The Fantasy Film

“The walls, where there was room, were well decorated with calendars and posters showing bright, improbable girls with pumped-up breasts and no hips - blondes, brunettes and redheads, but always with this bust development, so that a visitor of another species might judge from the preoccupation of artist and audience that the seat of procreation lay in the mammaries. Alice Chicoy...who worked among the shining girls, was wide-hipped and sag-chested and she walked well back on her heels...She was not in the least jealous of the calendar girls and the Coca-Cola girls. She had never seen anyone like them, and she didn't think anyone ever had.”
― John Steinbeck, The Wayward Bus

“The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“In her book claiming that allegations of ritualistic abuse are mostly confabulations, La Fontaine’s (1998) comparison of social workers to ‘nazis’ shows the depth of feeling evident amongst many sceptics. However, this raises an important question: Why did academics and journalists feel so strongly about allegations of ritualistic abuse, to the point of pervasively misrepresenting the available evidence and treating women disclosing ritualistic abuse, and those workers who support them, with barely concealed contempt? It is of course true that there are fringe practitioners in the field of organised abuse, just as there are fringe practitioners in many other health-related fields. However, the contrast between the measured tone of the majority of therapists and social workers writing on ritualistic abuse, and the over-blown sensationalism of their critics, could not be starker. Indeed, Scott (2001) notes with irony that the writings of those who claimed that ‘satanic ritual abuse’ is a ‘moral panic’ had many of the features of a moral panic: scapegoating therapists, social workers and sexual abuse victims whilst warning of an impending social catastrophe brought on by an epidemic of false allegations of sexual abuse. It is perhaps unsurprising that social movements for people accused of sexual abuse would engage in such hyperbole, but why did this rhetoric find so many champions in academia and the media?”
― Michael Salter, Organised Sexual Abuse

“Reagan’s easy slippage between movies and reality is synechdochic for a political culture increasingly impervious to distinctions between fiction and history.”
― Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan The Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology