Mass media

"Hitler's vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording . . . Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science." Aldous Huxley

"Can you blame me if I am pursued by the thought of how much we could do to remedy social evils, if only we had an honest and disinterested press?" Upton Sinclair

"The announcement 'This is the First German Television with the Tagesschau' is often the halal to attempted dumbing down of the people." Volker Bräutigam

"It is impossible for me to estimate how many of my early impressions of the world, correct and the opposite, came to me through newspapers. Homicide, adultery, no-hit pitching, and Balkanism were concepts that, left to my own devices, I would have encountered much later in life." A. J. Liebling

"Sure, the media don't depict reality, they create it! And that's why we need counter-publicity!" Niklas Luhmann

"The power of radio can be compared only with the power of the atomic bomb." Paul Felix Lazarsfeld

"In an age in which the media broadcast countless pieces of foolishness, the educated man is defined not by what he knows, but by what he doesn't know." Nicolás Gómez Dávila

"So long as the media are not entirely monopolized, the individual can play one medium off against another; he can compare them, and hence resist what any one of them puts out. The more genuine competition there is among the media, the more resistance the individual might be able to command. But how much is this now the case? Do people compare reports on public events or policies, playing one medium’s content off against another’s? The answer is: generally no, very few do: We know that people tend strongly to select those media which carry contents with which they already agree. There is a kind of selection of new opinions on the basis of prior opinions. No one seems to search out such counter-statements as may be found in alternative media offerings. Given radio programs and magazines and newspapers often get a rather consistent public, and thus reinforce their messages in the minds of that public. This idea of playing one medium off against another assumes that the media really have varying contents. It assumes genuine competition, which is not widely true. The media display an apparent variety and competition, but on closer view they seem to compete more in terms of variations on a few standardized themes than of clashing issues. The freedom to raise issues effectively seems more and more to be confined to those few interests that have ready and continual access to these media." Charles Wright Mills

"Very little of what we think we know of the social realities of the world have we found out first-hand. Most of ‘the pictures in our heads’ we have gained from these media—even to the point where we often do not really believe what we see before us until we read about it in the paper or hear about it on the radio. The media not only give us information; they guide our very experiences. Our standards of credulity, our standards of reality, tend to be set by these media rather than by our own fragmentary experience." Charles Wright Mills

"By now, the Bild newspaper is almost the official government paper." Heinrich Böll

"If it is not in the media... it did not happen. If it did not happen, but is in the media... we believe it has happened." Charles T. Tart

"Another century of newspapers and all words will stink." Friedrich Nietzsche

"Humans are communications junkies. We just can't get enough." Alan Kay

"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots." Umberto Eco