Mass media

"When I sometimes leaf through my company's press review in the morning, I get the feeling that the range of opinion used to be broader. There is an astonishing homogeneity in German editorial offices when it comes to weighing up and classifying information. The pressure to conform in the minds of journalists seems to me to be quite high." Frank-Walter Steinmeier

"Our society is run by mad men, for crazy targets. I think we are driven by mad men, to a mad end, And I think I am imprisoned as a madman because I say that. That is what's insane about it." John Lennon

"he who dictates and formulates the words and phrases we use, he who is master of the press and radio, is master of the mind." Joost A.M. Meerloo

"Name me a country where journalists and politicians get along, and I'll tell you there's no democracy." Hugh Carleton Greene

"If terrorism is based on creating fear—the greatest terrorism is media." Simen Valom

"The ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas in every epoch, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has at its disposal the means of material production has at the same time at its disposal the means of intellectual production, so that, on average, the thoughts of those who lack the means of intellectual production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the ruling material conditions, the ruling material conditions conceived as ideas; that is, the conditions that make one class the ruling class, the ideas of its rule." Marx/Engels

"Mass media do not convey reality, they create it." Prof. Querulix

"What they call ‘public opinion’ is media opinion: an opinion created by education and the media." José Luis Sampedro

"Politicians seem to be less bothered by corruption itself than by its exposure in the media." Markus M. Ronner

"Shortly, the public will be unable to reason or think for themselves. They’ll only be able to parrot the information they’ve been given on the previous night’s news." Zbigniew Brzezinski

"Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few." Aldous Huxley

"This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country´s working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody. To parody the words of W. Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by few." Aldous Huxley

"To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, “by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.” Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it’s benefits, than is done by it’s abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false." Thomas Jefferson

"In times of war, there is a level of information control in reporting that is abhorrent in the case of traditional wars. In the case of a pandemic, however, one must take less democratic measures from one moment to the next [...] Over the past two years, with the outbreak of the pandemic, we have seen that the way our world is organized is outdated. Two aspects are affected by this: communication and global governance. In terms of communication, we immediately used the term “war” because it is a war, but we have not implemented a communication policy in any country that is appropriate for a war [...] I believe that in this pandemic, or at least in future global health disasters, we need to find a system that preserves freedom of expression but reconciles it with information rationed from above." Mario Monti