1,331 Media Quotes

Media people should have long noses like an elephant to smell out politicians, mayors, prime ministers and businessmen. We need to know the reality, the good and the bad, not just the appearance.

It must be said that today, at the end of its semantic evolution, the word 'terrorist' is an intrinsically propagandistic term. It has no neutral readability. It dispenses with all reasoned examination of political situations, of their causes and consequences.

To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate - unlike most films.

A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.

How right politicians are to look upon their constituents as cattle! Anyone who has any experience of dealing with any class as such knows the futility of appealing to intelligence, indeed to any other qualities than those of brutes.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

The tribunal here and your American newspapers talk so much about our sharp Nazi methods, but do you realize that within the past year, since the defeat of Germany, 1 million Germans have been evicted from what was originally German territory and which has now been given to Poland? No League of Nations or other body intervened.

We must build a trickle-up media that reflects the true character of this country and its people. A democratic media serving a democratic society.

I met someone on the street who said wasn't it great that we're going to have a movie star for president, that it was so Pop, and (laughs) when you think about it like that, it is great, it's so American.

When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.

I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo.

Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

If I blow my nose, it gets written all over the world.

I hate the whole reluctant sex-symbol thing. It's such bull. You see these dudes greased up, in their underwear, talking about how they don't want to be a sex symbol.

The appropriation of radical thinking by lazy, self-obsessed hippies is a public relations disaster that could cost the earth.

Darwinism is still very much alive, utterly dominating biology. Despite the fact that no one has ever been able to prove the creation of a single distinct species by Darwinist means, Darwinism dominates the academy and the media.

Written words differ from spoken words in being material structures. A spoken word is a process in the physical world, having an essential time-order; a written word is a series of pieces of matter, having an essential space-order.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.

I made a pact with myself a long time ago: Never watch anything stupider than you. It's helped me a lot.

Is it against the law to kill a reporter?

I don't think there's much distinction between surveillance and media in general. Better media means better surveillance. Cams are everywhere.

Well, they didn't lack for topics after Hiroshima. Why should 9/11 slow them down? I know it got a lot of press, but it's just a few large buildings and aircraft, it's not like D-Day and the Seige of Berlin.

The reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today and they, or rather we [journalists], too often are squandering our power and ignoring our obligations. The consequence of our abdication of responsibility is the ugly spectacle of idiot culture!

The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing. We now have a mainstream press whose news agenda is increasingly influenced by this netherworld.

We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

I certainly think that when I flick through all the magazines at the hairdresser's I like to see and am drawn to images that have an intelligence and mind at work behind them.

As well as being a vulgar producer of her own spectacle, and an embarrassment to her family, Cindy Sheehan is at best a shifty fantasist.

The polls undoubtedly help to decide what people think, but their most important long-term influence may be on how people think. The interrogative process is very distinctly weighted against the asking of an intelligent question or the recording of a thoughtful answer.

My Fox guys, I love every single one of them.

I think Superman should go on the Larry King show and announce that he would come back to life if people in all 50 states wanted him to.

Patriotism is as sickening today as it has ever been. I was watching the news before you came and there was a lot of coverage of Kosovo and the problems there. They showed footage of people burning an American flag. And the newscaster got all broken up and teary-eyed. He says, 'I guess [sob] I just feel something here, folks, when I see the American flag being burned.' And I said, 'You fucking asshole. Whatever happened to the news?'

What I would like to emanate from the darkness of this tragedy is one spark of life. I mean, the realization that crime does not begin when you murder people. Crime begins with propaganda, even if such propaganda is for a good cause. The moment propaganda turns against another nation or against any human being, evil starts. Whereas the Germans started propaganda toward the end of this tragedy, you Allies stand at the beginning of the tragedy.

I do not by any means want to deny that I and my fellow workers selected news and quotations following a certain tendency. It is the curse of propaganda during war that one works only with black and white. But to my knowledge it is a mistake to believe that in the Propaganda Ministry thousands of little lies were hatched out. If we had lied on a thousand small things, the enemy would have been able to deal with us more easily than was the case.

Hollywood can't believe that anyone does anything without an eye on the public, as if every actor wants to read about himself in the papers. It's depressing to think that such an artificial and unbalanced community exerts so much influence on our country.

Once the press learnt of her success, she was called 'the girl from Mars'.

It's not us making this charge. It's the media.

'She's the most unbelievable actress I have ever met,' said a woman who worked on Hillary's Senate campaign. 'I remember one time at a Women's Leadership Forum event in New York, thirty of us sat around Hillary, talking about politics. And she said, 'You know, I love this organization, not just because we sit around and talk about politics, but because of the bonds of friendship forming around us.' The way she said it, people were riveted by her performance. But I had gotten to know her, and I could tell she didn't mean it. She has this unbelievable ability to be a liar. She is soulless.'

When she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.

I am watching Hillary Clinton in her victory speech in New Hampshire: they just threw a bunch of college kids behind her, and had her talk about student loans, and had her daughter come out for a long awkward hug: does anyone actually buy it? Surely young people are too media savvy to be fooled by this kind of shit. Do we live in a democracy so we can just keep electing the same families? Barack is the first candidate in my lifetime to strip some of this bullshit away, and I just hope we don't blow this chance. Man if we miss this opportunity we don't deserve it: how bad does it have to get?

Cette bonhomie apparente qui seduit les nouveaux venus et n'empeche aucune trahison, qui se permet et justifie tout, qui jette les hauts cris a une blessure et la pardonne, est un des caracteres distinctifs du journaliste. Cette camaraderie, mot cree par un homme d'esprit, corrode les plus belles ames: elle rouille leur fierte, tue le principe des grandes ?uvres, et consacre la lachete de l'esprit.

Like President Reagan, he is a Teflon man. No matter how many mistakes he makes during a telecast, no matter how glaring his weaknesses as a performer, nothing sticks to him. The television critics, wooed by his smooth off-camera personality, generally rave about him, rarely taking him to task on purely objective standards.

Nothing is more meaningless or irrelevant than sports writing.

Without me, the nature of the telecasts was entirely altered. I had commanded attention. I had a palpable impact on the show, giving it a sense of moment. If that sounds like ego, what can I say? I'm telling it like it is.

He rose to prominence during a time of drama and upheaval in sports. His style -- part journalist, part carnival barker -- made him unique.

He was loud, boisterous and extreme, but he really got people's attention and he was really bright.

'I don't know much about E-raq and raging gas prices, but let's rock on.'

When I went into the clinic last April 30, George Bush was about 50 points ahead of his closest Democratic opponent in next year's Presidential Election. When I finally escaped from the horrible place, less than three weeks late, Bush's job-approval ratings had been cut in half - and even down into single digits, in some states - and the Republican Party was panicked and on the run. It was a staggering reversal in a very short time, even shorter than it took for his equally crooked father to drop from 93 percent approval, down to as low as 43 percent and even 41 percent in the last doomed days of the first doomed Bush Administration. After that, he was Bill Clinton's punching bag.

There was one exact moment, in fact, when I knew for sure that Al Gore would never be President of the United States, no matter what the experts were saying - and that was when the whole Bush family suddenly appeared on TV and openly scoffed at the idea of Gore winning Florida. It was Nonsense, said the Candidate, Utter nonsense. . . Anybody who believed Bush had lost Florida was a Fool. The Media, all of them, were Liars & Dunces or treacherous whores trying to sabotage his victory. . . Here was the whole bloody Family laughing & hooting & sneering at the dumbness of the whole world on National TV. The old man was the real tip-off. The leer on his face was almost frightening. It was like looking into the eyes of a tall hyena with a living sheep in its mouth. The sheep's fate was sealed, and so was Al Gore's.

The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's coming now. The party's over, folks. . . [Censorship of the news] is a given in wartime, along with massive campaigns of deliberately-planted 'Dis-information'. That is routine behavior in Wartime - for all countries and all combatants - and it makes life difficult for people who value real news.

This blizzard of mind-warping war propaganda out of Washington is building up steam. Monday is Anthrax, Tuesday is Bankruptcy, Friday is Child-Rape, Thursday is Bomb-scares, etc., etc., etc... If we believed all the brutal, frat-boy threats coming out of the White House, we would be dead before Sunday. It is pure and savage terrorism reminiscent of Nazi Germany.

This is no time for the 'leader of the free world' to be falling asleep at massively-popular sporting events. . .Was [Bush] drunk? Does he fear the sight of an uncovered nipple? Was he lying? Does he believe in his heart that there are more evangelical Christians in this country than football fans and sex-crazed yoyos with unstable minds? Is he really as dumb as he looks and acts? These are all unsatisfactory questions at a time like this.

There were other outlaws who missed the brass ring in the fifties. Lenny Bruce was one of them; he was never quite right for television. Bruce had tremendous potential until about 1961, when the people who had been getting such a kick out of him suddenly realized he was serious.

It would be one way to kill off the merchandising.

Journalists banging on my front door! Don't like that at all.

People walk up to me and say, 'You're not as big as you are on telly, are you?' Well, I don't know. How big's your fucking television?

We want to tell American parents that they and they alone have total power to control every hour of television programming that comes into their home.

We are facing a very new and a very troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life and we are facing it from a thing called the video cassette recorder and its necessary companion called the blank tape. And it is like a great tidal wave just off the shore. This video cassette recorder and the blank tape threaten profoundly the life-sustaining protection, I guess you would call it, on which copyright owners depend, on which film people depend, on which television people depend and it is called copyright.

The Ninth Circuit Court decision was lucid, unambiguous, and consistent. The logic was clear and it said when you use copyrighted material on a video cassette recorder, it is an infringement of copyright.

You've already got a DVD. It lasts forever. It never wears out. In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless.

The basic mission of the rating system is a simple one: to offer to parents some advance information about movies so that parents can decide what movies they want their children to see or not to see. The entire rostrum of the rating program rests on the assumption of responsibility by parents.

Will a democratic society allow just three corporate entities to wield unprecedented dominion over television, the most decisive voice in the land? There are now only three national networks... There will never be more than three national networks.

Interviewer: Aaaand finally, Jade, since you're named after an ornamental stone used as decoration, do you have any kids?

Interviewer: 'Hey Jade, are the rest of the guys jealous that the entire 'Girl's Not Grey' video occurs in your crotch?'

Interviewer: 'What's the weirdest question you've ever been asked?'

The fabulous Eva, Government Glad-Hand Girl No. 1 of the extravagant political novelette that is Argentina.

I do not know why journalists insist on calling their stuff 'pieces', when they are in fact little entities, attempting to have beginnings, middles and endings.

But one of Clinton's problems was, the interest groups don't care about the working poor. The Republicans don't care about the working poor - they don't know any. The Op-Ed writers don't care about the working poor. The editorial writers don't care about the working poor. The talking heads don't care about the working poor.

'Isn't it amazing that there's such a sizable number of people in the media and in the liberal community that despise this country and its freedoms, and they're doing everything they can to undermine it?'

He caun ne'er be bothered but maun e'er be waked. If there is a future in every past that is present Quis est qui non novit quinnigan and Qui quae quot at Quinnigan's Quake! Stump! His producers are they not his consumers? Your exagmination round his factification for incamination of a warping process. Declaim! (496.34 - 497.3)

People are always dying in the Times who don't seem to die in other papers, and they die at greater length and maybe even with a little more grace.

I du believe with all my soul In the gret Press's freedom, To pint the people to the goal An' in the traces lead 'em.

Our papers don't purtend to print on'y wut Guv'ment choose, An' thet insures us all to git the very best o' noose.

'It's your radio station. Not theirs.' I think that should be your tag line.

That's what the problem is with the Internet, this great escape that we have, everything automatically becomes fact!

Afterwards, President Bush said, 'Maliki is the right man for the job.' Just to remind you, Bush also said FEMA's Michael Brown was the right man for the job, Donald Rumsfeld was the right man for the job, Tom DeLay was the right man for the job: which would be okay if Bush was the right man for the job.

Young Hispanics are consuming media in English, regardless of what they speak at home.

It's a good thing you're gonna get that truck. The bad thing is you're gonna be smiling all day on TV and I don't think that that's pretty.

Having been a villain in wrestling, my relationship with the media has always been rocky. They don't view wrestling for what it really is, entertainment.

Cinema has evolved in two paths. One is spectacle. Like the phantasmagoria, its goal is the creation of a total substitute sensory world. The other is peep show, which claims for its realm both the erotic and the untampered observance of real life, and imitates the keyhole or voyeur's window without need of color, noise, grandeur.

I'm sick of dour faces Staring at me from the T.V. Tower. I want roses in my garden bower; dig?

What that book (Lords and New Creatures) is a lot about is the powerlessness that people have in the face of reality. They have no real control over events or their own lives. Something is controlling them. The closest they ever get is the television set.

I think that more than writing and music, my greatest talent is that I have an instinctive knack of self-image propagation. I was very good at manipulating publicity with a few little phrases like 'erotic politicians'. Having grown up with TV and mass magazines, I knew instinctively what people would catch on to, so I dropped those little jewels here and there, seemingly very innocently; of course, I was just calling signals.

I am pimping it out for you at the Academy Awards.

I don't believe the answer for us is to invoke the Lord's name 55 times in a speech. It looks political.

The newspapers said, 'Say, what you're doing in bed?' I said 'We're only trying to get us some peace.'

The 'medium is the message' is one of the world's silliest remarks. The message is the message, and it doesn't matter whether you send it by e-mail, a note in a bottle or on a picture postcard. The book, or the poem, or the play is what counts and it doesn't matter if it's written with a pen on a long sheet of ruled paper, as I am writing now, or on the most highly developed word processor. No machine can help with the rhythms of your prose, even if it can spell better than you can.

Television is one of the few things that works well in this country. This must be why the government has decided to destroy it.

On one occasion Kid Jensen, Paul Burnett and myself - not a carefully honed fighting team, but nonetheless filled with drink - we went down and waited in the underground carpark at the BBC for the opportunity to beat up Simon Bates. Fortunately he didn't turn up, or we might have suffered an embarrassing reverse, as he's probably stronger than us.

I get letters from people who say 'I hadn't listened to your programme for twelve years, and I was driving home the other night and heard something I thought was fantastic. I've listened every night since, and it was just how it used to be.' Sometimes kids write in and say, 'I was listening to your programme in my bedroom the other night when I was doing my homework, and my mum came in and said, 'What are you listening to?' I said, 'John Peel,' and she said, 'Oh, I used to listen to him when I was your age.'' It's nice being woven into people's lives in that way.

You can either see it as selfless dedication to public service broadcasting, or a shocking lack of ambition. (On his career at Radio One)