Mass media

"Soap opera seems to be a dirty word, but actually they are the most popular shows we have." Dan Stevens

"The person who does not think for himself falls prey to the hypnosis of the mass media and the whispers of demagogues." Erich Fromm

"In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth." Charles Wright Mills

"Totalitarian systems have always been maintained primarily by systematic indoctrination and propaganda, injected into the population on a daily basis via mass media (without mass media, it is not possible to generate such long-lasting mass formation as that which gave rise to Stalinism and Nazism). This way, the population is literally kept on the vibrational frequency of the voice of totalitarian leaders." Mattias Desmet

"Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails." Neil Postman

"Meteorologists are pretty faces reading scripts telling you whether it's going to rain tomorrow." Noam Chomsky

"The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!" Noam Chomsky

"The whole problem with news on television comes down to this: all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on a page of a newspaper. And the world cannot be understood in one page." Neil Postman

"The current moguls understand that true media power lies not in firing up our outrage, as Hearst did, but in befuddling it or tranquilizing it with new toys. The idea is to render us passive so that they can exercise their power to sell us a bunch of stuff we mostly don't need and mostly don't want." Richard Warren Schickel

"I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy." A. J. Liebling

"The "Western media" is the head of a talking snake." James Morcan

"Real journalism is publishing something that somebody else does not want published - the rest is just public relations." George Orwell

"Personal publicity of every kind is utterly distasteful to me, and I have made greater efforts to escape it than most people make to get it." Albert Jay Nock

"Language makes infinite use of finite media." Wilhelm von Humboldt