Mass media

"It's no mystery why many of us in the media can't get enough of the fabricators Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, the latter of whom concocted more than a score of bogus feature stories for the New Republic (and who wrote for other magazines, including this one, once) in the mid-1990s. Anyone--journalist, student, academic--who has ever stared at a blank screen, their brains grinding emptiness, and thought, How can I fill this hole? knows that in those desperate moments before a deadline, almost anyone can do almost anything: make stuff up, plagiarize, scribble senseless half-truths." David Edelstein

"Because of how much movies cost, it's dangerous to be experimental on one film after the other. But we can experiment with television. We can do things that are fringe and bring ideas to the table that are offbeat and original." Steven Spielberg

"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

"No one outside America any longer believes the US media or the US government... You can't believe a word the American media says. If they say anything correct, it's just an accident." Paul Craig Roberts

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

"Medicine is not healthcare, food is healthcare. Medicine is sick care. Let’s all get that straight for a change." Karen Pendergrass

"Any person or organization depends ultimately on public approval, and is therefore faced with the problem of engineering the public’s consent to a program or goal." Edward Bernays

"The best defense against propaganda: more propaganda." Edward Bernays

"The only difference between ‘propaganda’ and ‘education,’ really, is in the point of view. The advocacy of what we believe in is education. The advocacy of what we don’t believe in is propaganda." Edward Bernays

"When I came back to the United States, I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace. And “propaganda” got to be a bad word because of the Germans using it, so what I did was to try and find some other words so we found the words “public relations”." Edward Bernays

"In every team there are players who never have the best stats. But always stay in the team, because they make their team-mates better and therefore also the team." Donna Paulsen

"Our profession is like that of actors. Without outside approval, we'll go under." Helmut Schmidt

"Fame Is Proof That The People Are Gullible" Ralph Waldo Emerson