Mass media

"I am open to everything now. I'm open to things that I never thought I would have been open to. And I -- I really think that the door fully came open. I've realized that everything in the -- in the news is BS, everything. There's nothing that I can consume on any legacy media that I can trust. And that is shocking. And that's disturbing. And it makes you wonder how long it's been going on for. And I'm concerned, it might have been a very long time." David Drew Pinsky

"A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction is left to interpret reality through illusion. Random facts or obscure bits of data and trivia are used either to bolster illusion and give it credibility, or discarded if they interfere with the message. The worse reality becomes—for example, as foreclosures and unemployment skyrocket—the more people seek refuge and comfort in illusions. When opinions cannot be distinguished from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe. This is the real danger of pseudo-events and why pseudo-events are far more pernicious than stereotypes. They do not explain reality, as stereotypes attempt to, but replace reality. Pseudo-events redefine reality by the parameters set by their creators. These creators, who make massive profits selling illusions, have a vested interest in maintaining the power structures they control." Chris Hedges

"In a world flooded with irrelevant information, clarity is power." Yuval Noah Harari

"Almost a hundred years ago, the philosopher John Dewey said that we are living in the greatest flood of mass suggestion that mankind has ever seen. But in 100 years, the superlative has only swelled, albeit without this being publicized today. Edward Bernays called propaganda the “executive arm of the invisible government”. And he recognized that propaganda is to democracies what violence is to dictators. Perhaps that would be a contemporary definition of propaganda: it is a Permanent Toxic Rape of Consciousness, or PTRC for short. It is a permanent mindfuck by governments and corporate business, mediated by the media, carried out by bought comedians à la Böhmermann, pseudo-journalists à la Lanz, pseudo-intellectuals à la Precht, pseudo-health politicians, such as the pharmaceutical and drugs minister Lauterbach, pseudo-defence politicians such as Strack-Rheinmetall-Zimmermann, and other parvenus such as Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim, Eckart von Hirschhausen, Sarah Bosetti and other stirrup holders in editorial offices, theaters or foundations." Milosz Matuschek

"It's often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth. But that's a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for most wars to begin, the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time in advance." Lester Neil Smith

"Swine flu was the first epidemic that was not spread by viruses, but by journalists. It quickly became clear that it was far less dangerous than our old winter flu - that most people were therefore unsuspecting and stupidly participating in the scaremongering by the pharmaceutical industry. Even the most responsible journalists usually lack a sense of proportion. We should keep this in mind: The great killers of humanity are hunger, malaria, AIDS, contaminated drinking water and road traffic." Wolf Dietrich Schneider

"The public debating chamber is at the heart of democracy. However, it can only fulfill its function if it is intact in the sense you mentioned. Since the media constitute the public debate space in the first place, they must be designed in such a way that they do not distort it in favor of powerful interest groups. By their very nature, corporate media cannot perform such a task, as their integration into economic power structures almost inevitably makes them an instrument with which powerful economic lobby groups can covertly introduce themselves into the public debate." Prof. Rainer Mausfeld

"In some departments of our daily life, in which we imagine ourselves free agents, we are ruled by dictators exercising great power." Edward Bernays

"People accept the facts which come to them through existing channels. They like to hear new things in accustomed ways. They have neither the time nor the inclination to search for facts that are not readily available to them." Edward Bernays

"There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes." Edward Bernays

"For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day." Walter Lippmann

"But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?" Walter Lippmann

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." Joseph Goebbels

"Some of the smartest people I know actively believe the press … amazing" Elon Musk