Best 3626 quotes in «media quotes» category

I'm a writer by profession and it's totally clear to me that since I started blogging, the amount I write has increased exponentially, my daily interactions with the views of others have never been so frequent, the diversity of voices I engage with is far higher than in the pre-Internet age—and all this has helped me become more modest as a thinker, more open to error, less fixated on what I do know, and more respectful of what I don't. If this is a deterioration in my brain, then more, please. "The problem is finding the space and time when this engagement stops, and calm, quiet, thinking and reading of longer-form arguments, novels, essays can begin. Worse, this also needs time for the mind to transition out of an instant gratification mode to me a more long-term, thoughtful calm. I find this takes at least a day of detox. Getting weekends back has helped. But if there were a way to channel the amazing insights of blogging into the longer, calmer modes of thinking ... we'd be getting somewhere. "I'm working on it.

I'm a writer to the bone. I love this language you and I read, write and speak. It's called English. And I'm seriously doubting that it's known to some of the unseen people who write the news.

I'm beginning to think information is our addictive madness.

(Media question to Beatles during first U.S. tour 1964) "How do you find America?" "Turn left at Greenland.

In accordance with the prevailing conceptions in the U.S., there is no infringement on democracy if a few corporations control the information system: in fact, that is the essence of democracy. In the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the leading figure of the public relations industry, Edward Bernays, explains that “the very essence of the democratic process” is “the freedom to persuade and suggest,” what he calls “the engineering of consent.” “A leader,” he continues, “frequently cannot wait for the people to arrive at even general understanding … Democratic leaders must play their part in … engineering … consent to socially constructive goals and values,” applying “scientific principles and tried practices to the task of getting people to support ideas and programs”; and although it remains unsaid, it is evident enough that those who control resources will be in a position to judge what is “socially constructive,” to engineer consent through the media, and to implement policy through the mechanisms of the state. If the freedom to persuade happens to be concentrated in a few hands, we must recognize that such is the nature of a free society.

In 1994, the average person spent $79 on books as compared to $56 on recorded music.

In all sorts of markets—music, film, art, and politics—the future of popularity will be harder to predict as the broadcast power of radio and television democratizes and the channels of exposure grow.... The gatekeepers had their day. Now there are simply too many gates to keep.

In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.

In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different roder from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this world almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information--misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information--information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?

In a sense, the media is a moving Potemkin village of understanding, constantly adapting and reconstructing after-the-fact.

In a world of distractions we begin to ‘live’ on the outside.

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?

Information or allegations reflecting negatively on individuals or groups seen less sympathetically by the intelligentsia pass rapidly into the public domain with little scrutiny and much publicity. Two of the biggest proven hoaxes of our time have involved allegations of white men gang-raping a black woman-- first the Tawana Brawley hoax of 1987 and later the false rape charges against three Duke University students in 2006. In both cases, editorial indignation rang out across the land, without a speck of evidence to substantiate either of these charges. Moreover, the denunciations were not limited to the particular men accused, but were often extended to society at large, of whom these men were deemed to be symptoms or 'the tip of the iceberg.' In both cases, the charges fit a pre-existing vision, and that apparently made mundane facts unnecessary. Another widely publicized hoax-- one to which the President of the United States added his sub-hoax-- was a 1996 story appearing in USA Today under the headline, 'Arson at Black Churches Echoes Bigotry of the Past.' There was, according to USA Today, 'an epidemic of church burning,' targeting black churches. Like the gang-rape hoaxes, this story spread rapidly through the media. The Chicago Tribune referred to 'an epidemic of criminal and cowardly arson' leaving black churches in ruins. As with the gang-rape hoaxes, comments on the church fire stories went beyond those who were supposed to have set these fires to blame forces at work in society at large. Jesse Jackson was quoted was quoted in the New York Times as calling these arsons part of a 'cultural conspiracy' against blacks, which 'reflected the heightened racial tensions in the south that have been exacerbated by the assault on affirmative action and the populist oratory of Republican politicians like Pat Buchanan.' Time magazine writer Jack White likewise blamed 'the coded phrases' of Republican leaders for 'encouraging the arsonists.' Columnist Barbara Reynolds of USA Today said that the fires were 'an attempt to murder the spirit of black America.' New York Times columnist Bob Herbert said, "The fuel for these fires can be traced to a carefully crafted environment of bigotry and hatred that was developed over the last century.' As with the gang-rape hoaxes, the charges publicized were taken as reflecting on the whole society, not just those supposedly involved in what was widely presumed to be arson, rather than fires that break out for a variety of other reasons. Washington Post columnist Dorothy Gilliam said that society in effect was 'giving these arsonists permission to commit these horrible crimes.' The climax of these comments came when President Bill Clinton, in his weekly radio address, said that these church burnings recalled similar burnings of black churches in Arkansas when he was a boy. There were more that 2,000 media stories done on the subject after the President's address. This story began to unravel when factual research showed that (1) no black churches were burned in Arkansas when Bill Clinton was growing up, (2) there had been no increase in fires at black churches, but an actual decrease over the previous 15 years, (3) the incidence of fires at white churches was similar to the incidence of fires at black churches, and (4) where there was arson, one-third of the suspects were black. However, retractions of the original story-- where there were retractions at all-- typically were given far less prominence than the original banner headlines and heated editorial comments.

In Indian social-cultural-political discourse there is a general tendency to ignore deeper, intellectual thought, and the sensationalist mass media has actually contributed to a great dumbing down of even the educated masses. In this climate where any and all intellectuality has been mostly confined to a few ivory towers of academy, it is difficult to get even the educated and socio-economically privileged section of the society interested in the idea of exploring any deeper intellectual thought. It seems as if the trinity of pop-sociology, pop-psychology and pop-culture has taken over the general mentality of the society leaving little room for any serious, intellectually rigorous discourse on social-cultural phenomena. If at all, there is any serious attempt to think through and understand the observed phenomena, it is almost always done using the intellectual theories and frameworks developed in the Western academic circles. But this habit of non-thinking or thinking only in terms of borrowed categories must change if we want India to awaken to her innate intellectual potential.

In my book, the media are a necessary evil: they live off the animal inside us, they bait the front pages with second-hand blood for the hyenas to snuffle up, but they come in useful enough that you want to stay on their good side.

Infelizmente, este espectáculo também só existe porque existem espectadores. Conta a lenda urbana que a guilhotina caiu em desuso na França do Terror, porque era uma forma demasiado rápida e demasiado limpa de tirar vidas. As massas ávidas de sofrimento, morte lenta e dor desinteressavam-se. Mas, numa era de «reality shows», onde multidões passam horas a espiolhar as casas de banho de cobaias humanas amestradas, as execuções do EI fecham o círculo das prosas bárbaras e fazem sentido.

In saying no one knew about the ideas implicit in the telegraph, I am not quite accurate. Thoreau knew. Or so one may surmise. It is alleged that upon being told that through the telegraph a man in Maine could instantly send a message to a man in Texas, Thoreau asked, "But what do they have to say to each other?" In asking this question, to which no serious interest was paid, Thoreau was directing attention to the psychological and social meaning of the telegraph, and in particular to its capacity to change the character of information -- from the personal and regional to the impersonal and global.

In previous centuries, the Church was the great controller, dictating morality, stifling free expression and posing as conservator of all great art and music. Instead we have TV, doing just as good a job at dictating fashions, thoughts, attitudes, objectives as did the Church, using many of the same techniques but doing it so palatably that no one notices. Instead of ‘sins’ to keep people in line, we have fears of being judged unacceptable by our peers (by not wearing the right shoes, not drinking the right kind of beer, or wearing the wrong kind of deodorant). Coupled with that fear is imposed insecurity concerning our own identities. All answers and solutions to these fears come through the television, and only through television. Only through exposure to TV can the new sins of alienation and ostracism be absolved.

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies—the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

In so far as the purported use of "violence" by the Animal Liberation Front in the furtherance of its fundamental mission is concerned; The fact of the matter is that violence cannot be committed against an inanimate object.

Instead of one-way interruption, Web marketing is about delivering useful content at just the precise moment that a buyer needs it. Search, a marketing method that didn't exist a decade ago, provides the most efficient and inexpensive way for businesses to find leads.

in spite of the phenomenal growth of the Internet and mobile devices, I still believe television will continue to be an incredibly important medium for the Church. After all, over the last century, radio never killed movies, and TV never killed radio. Everything finds its level in the media universe.

In the future we would have total storage, all of us would, our media libraries would dematerialise and just float above us, books would no longer sit on the shelves reminding us that we had not read them, music and TV and film formats would no longer clutter the den reminding us of all we had not yet listened to or watched.

In the absence of a confirmed fact, rumors are usually sanctified as the truth. And that is what goes out there in the media.

In the American media, white people debate whether race matters, rich people debate whether poverty matters, and men debate whether gender matters. People for whom these problems must matter -- for they structure the limitations of their lives -- are locked out of the discussion.

In their eyes, Eve saw the wolf gleam. The story was the prey, ratings the trophy.

In the last 10 years, we have seen a rise in selfishness: selfies, self-absorbed people, superficiality, self-degradation, apathy, and self-destruction. So I challenge all of you to take initiative to change this programming. Instead of celebrating the ego, let's flip the script and celebrate the heart. Let's put the ego and celebrity culture to sleep, and awaken the conscience. This is the battle we must all fight together to win back our humanity. To save our future and our children.

In the modern world, if you want to travel off the beaten path, stay off the beaten media path.

In the political/geopolitical news segment - one who pays someone to create content has a hidden agenda, and one who likes to get paid for the content creation has a vested interest.

In the specific case of the use of the term “false memory” to describe errors in details in laboratory tasks (e.g., in word-learning tasks), the media and public are set up all too easily to interpret such research as relevant to “false memories” of abuse because the term is used in the public domain to refer to contested memories of abuse. Because the term “false memory” is inextricably tied in the public to a social movement that questions the veracity of memories for childhood sexual abuse, the use of the term in scientific research that evaluates memory errors for details (not whole events) must be evaluated in this light." From: What's in a Name for Memory Errors? Implications and Ethical Issues Arising From the Use of the Term “False Memory” for Errors in Memory for Details, Journal: Ethics & Behavior 14(3) pages 201-233, 2004

In the large sense, I have to disagree with Bakunin, one thing austerity rhetoric has suggested is that when the people are being beaten with a stick, they are much happier if the media call it the People’s Democratic Stick.

In the moral realm, there is very little consensus left in Western countries over the proper basis of moral behavior. And because of the power of the media, for millions of men and women the only venue where moral questions are discussed and weighed is the talk show, where more often than not the primary aim is to entertain, even shock, not to think. When Geraldo and Oprah become the arbiters of public morality, when the opinion of the latest media personality is sought on everything from abortion to transvestites, when banality is mistaken for profundity because [it's] uttered by a movie star or a basketball player, it is not surprising that there is less thought than hype. Oprah shapes more of the nation's grasp of right and wrong than most of the pulpits in the land. Personal and social ethics have been removed from the realms of truth and structures of thoughts; they have not only been relativized, but they have been democratized and trivialized.

In the "Republic," Plato vigorously attacked the oral, poetized form as a vehicle for communicating knowledge. He pleaded for a more precise method of communication and classification ("The Ideas"), one which would favor the investigation of facts, principles of reality, human nature, and conduct. What the Greeks meant by "poetry" was radically different from what we mean by poetry. Their "poetic" expression was a product of a collective psyche and mind. The mimetic form, a technique that exploited rhythm, meter and music, achieved the desired psychological response in the listener. Listeners could memorize with greater ease what was sung than what was said. Plato attacked this method because it discouraged disputation and argument. It was in his opinion the chief obstacle to abstract, speculative reasoning - he called it "a poison, and an enemy of the people.

I only object when any one particular group...gets a stranglehold on American criticism and squeezes out anybody who doesn't conform to its own standards....The ax falls, ecumenically, on the head of anybody...who doesn't share this group's parochial preoccupations.

I pointed out that the very proliferation of pseudo journalism these days, the cacophony of conjecture and partisan agendas and sensationalism that seem orchestrated above all to provoke and entertain, tended to leave me feeling as though I know less than ever what my government is doing in my name. Drinking, Alistair shrugged and nodded as if to concede: Yes, well, there's always the moronic inferno.

It doesn't matter if justice is on your side. You have to depict your position as just.

I swear it only hit me then, with full conscious force, who the real villains of this piece had been from start to finish…those lying, cancerous dogs of the mainstream media!

I said once that lies have no rights against truth. I was wrong. In daily life, it's the truth that's disenfranchised. What fits the popular narrative, what makes an observer happy with the consistency of events, is what is believed.

...isn't it possible that advertising as a whole is a fantastic fraud, presenting an image of America taken seriously by no one, least of all the advertising men who create it?

I think journalism anywhere should be based on social justice and impartiality, making contributions to society as well as taking responsibility in society. Whether you are capitalist or socialist or Marxist, journalists should have the same professional integrity. --Tan Hongkai

I think people need to recognize that those of us who have been so much influenced by violence in the media- in particular pornographic violence- are not some kinds of inherent monsters. We are your sons, and we are your husbands. And we grew up in regular families.

I think that of all the principles for journalism, the most important is to complicate simple things and simplify complicated things. At first sight, you may think something is simple, but it may conceal a great deal. However, facing a very complex thing, you should find out its essence. -Jin Yongquan

I think that the media and its influencers send out a negative message to young girls these days, when it comes to the relationship between power and money. The message that young girls receive these days, from watching reality t.v. shows and such, is that the more money you spend, the more powerful you are. But I'd like young girls everywhere to know that it's not about the money that you spend; but what it's really about is the money that you have! Financial power lies in actually having money and your intelligence is determined by how you spend it. And it's not even about buying only what you need, because we should have the things that we want, too, not only the things that we need! But it's more about knowing the value of material things because without the knowledge of the value, things aren't going to make you happy, because there's always something more that you can buy! So you've got to know how to buy what's really going to make you happy and not just buy things for the sake of spending.

I thought I was getting away from politics for a while. But I now realise that the vuvuzela is to these World Cup blogs what Julius Malema is to my politics columns: a noisy, but sadly unavoidable irritant. With both Malema and the vuvuzela, their importance is far overstated. Malema: South Africa's Robert Mugabe? I think not. The vuvuzela: an archetypal symbol of 'African culture?' For African civilisation's sake, I seriously hope not. Both are getting far too much airtime than they deserve. Both have thrust themselves on to the world stage through a combination of hot air and raucous bluster. Both amuse and enervate in roughly equal measure. And both are equally harmless in and of themselves — though in Malema's case, it is the political tendency that he represents, and the right-wing interests that lie behind his diatribes that is dangerous. With the vuvu I doubt if there are such nefarious interests behind the scenes; it may upset the delicate ears of the middle classes, both here and at the BBC, but I suspect that South Africa's democracy will not be imperilled by a mass-produced plastic horn.

It hurts. It's painful. But no one's dead.

It is not always easy. Your successes are unheralded -- your failures are trumpeted. I sometimes have that feeling myself." [Speech at CIA Headquarters, November 28, 1961]

It is never to late to practice proper Netiquette. Start today. Be nice! NetworkEtiquette.net

It is noted that from 1967 to 1995 essays on negative emotions far outnumbered those on positive emotions in the psychological literature. The ratio was 21:1. Even those supreme perpetrators of pop nihilism, The New York Times and The Washington Post, have a better ratio than psychological literature. They average 12 negative stories to every one that might be construed to be non-negative. Many of their non-negative stories, however, cover success in sports and entertainment. I demand that the purveyors of despair who pretend to be dispassionate observes of the human condition go ahead and disclose that the 10 most beautiful words in the English languages are chimes, dawn, golden, hush, lullaby, luminous, melody, mist, murmuring, and tranquil; that Java sparrows prefer the music of Back over that of Schoenberg; that math experts have determined there are 1/96 trillion ways to lace up your shoes; that the Inuit term for making love is translated as ‘laughing together in bed;' and that according to Buckminster Fuller, “pollution is nothing but resources we’re not harvesting.

It is not true that the world hates America. It is the world’s Left that hates America. However, because the Left dominates the world’s news media and because nearly everyone, understandably, relies on the news media for their understanding of what happens in the world, many people, including Americans, believe that ‘the world’ hates America. And, of course, the Left-dominated media help to create much of the hatred for America that does exist. If I relied exclusively on the New York Times or Le Monde or the Guardian or CNN International or virtually any of the world’s major television and radio news stations and newspapers for all I knew about America, I would probably hold it in contempt as well.

It is now certain that the public does know. It is not so certain that the public does care.