Mass media

"I buy the FAZ on paper - and read NZZ, Spiegel and Bild online before the paywall. But I am just as informed as if I had subscribed to it. When I see the headline and the author, I already know what the text says. I also know who among the authors is currently behind with their alimony payments and therefore has to write in a certain direction." Harald Schmidt

"The ruling class has the schools and press under its thumb. This enables it to sway the emotions of the masses." Albert Einstein

"What's the difference between a pop star and a terrorist? You can negotiate with a terrorist." Madonna

"It does not really matter whether democracy functions according to its original idea but rather that it is seen as functional by the population." Rudolf Augstein

"Universal suffrage did not give the masses the right to decide, but to approve the decision of one elite or another." José Ortega y Gasset

"No group of sociologists can approximate the ad teams in the gathering and processing of exploitable social data. The ad teams have billions to spend annually on research and testing of reactions, and their products are magnificent accumulations of material about the shared experience and feelings of the entire community." Marshall McLuhan

"Publicity is the deliberate attempt to manage the public's perception of a subject. The subjects of publicity include people (for example, politicians and performing artists), goods and services, organizations of all kinds, and works of art or entertainment." Marshall McLuhan

"We manipulate people like crazy in films and they love it. It’s a tremendous release. Every film composer mixes his experiences with a talent for musical manipulation, then projects that Machiavellian power gut to gut. The big thing about sexy music is the power of suggestion. A song with a porno lyric may cause laughter or embarrassment, but never an invitation to the bedroom. Sensual singing, an insistent beat that builds, suggestive lyrics — these are what turn people on today. One of the biggest motivations in record sales is the bedroom lure, which record companies all know about. Music is used everywhere to condition the human mind. Hitler used Wagner to win the German masses to Naziism. Our future music may be a frequency machine feeding impulses to our nervous system through electrodes or the ear, giving us highs and lows more powerful than any drugs in use today. And much more dangerous, too, because nobody takes musical manipulation very seriously." Eddy Lawrence Manson

"We always give the public their heroes. We give the heroes to every faction, and then people once they hear this person say all the right things, we give releases to them because he or she speaks for ‘me’. We say go there go do that and they do it. We give our power to the authorized heroes." Albert Pike

"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." Aldous Huxley

"Give them a lying newspaper in the morning, let them work a lot during the day for little money and bring the latest manipulated news on TV in the evening, alternating with dumbed-down shows, movies and commercials. Thus they have no more time to think consciously." Unbekannt

"The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today. It is a great distributor for ideas and opinions. The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation. Because pictures are made to meet market demands, they reflect, emphasize and even exaggerate broad popular tendencies, rather than stimulate new ideas and opinions. The motion picture avails itself only of ideas and facts which are in vogue. As the newspaper seeks to purvey news, it seeks to purvey entertainment." Edward Bernays

"Political and economic power in the United States is concentrated in the hands of a “ruling elite” that controls most of U.S.-based multinational corporations, major communication media, the most influential foundations, major private universities and most public utilities. Founded in 1921, the Council of Foreign Relations is the key link between the large corporations and the federal government. It has been called a “school for statesmen” and “comes close to being an organ of what C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite – a group of men, similar in interest and outlook shaping events from invulnerable positions behind the scenes. The creation of the United Nations was a Council project, as well as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank." Steve Jacobson

"That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. . . . as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power. . . . Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach." Walter Lippmann