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Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
-G. K. Chesterton, "On the Cryptic and the Elliptic", 1908
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The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control -- indoctrination, we might say -- exercised through the mass media.
-Noam Chomsky
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The very hirelings of the press, whose trade it is to buoy up the spirits of the people. have uttered falsehoods so long, they have played off so many tricks, that their budget seems, at last, to be quite empty.
-William Cobbett
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It is a misfortune that necessity has induced men to accord greater license to this formidable engine, in order to obtain liberty, than can be borne with less important objects in view; for the press, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.
-James Fenimore Cooper
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It is a seldom proferred argument as to the advantages of a free press that it has a major function in keeping the government itself informed as to what the government is doing.
-Walter Cronkite
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Not only do we have a right to know, we have a duty to know what our Government is doing in our name. If there's a criticism to be made today, it's that the press isn't doing enough to put the pressure on the government to provide information.
-Walter Cronkite
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Today enormous effort goes into convincing the American public that we're just consumers of media manipulation and sound-bites and spin doctors. That we care only about ourselves, money, and stuff. That acting out of passion and conviction doesn't make a difference. But all history shows that it does.
-Bernadine Dorn
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Wooing the press is an exercise roughly akin to picnicking with a tiger. You might enjoy the meal, but the tiger always eats last.
-Maureen Dowd
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Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th'ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward.
-Finley Peter Dunne, "Mr. Dooley's Opinions", 1900
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It's like a play we're watching
-James Dye
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People read the papers not in the hopes of learning something new, but in the expectation of being told what they already know. This is a form of living death. Its apotheosis is the daily poll in USA Today, which informs us what percentage of a small number of unscientifically selected people called a toll number to vote on questions that cannot possibly be responded to with a yes or no.
-Roger Ebert
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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, "Slate magazine"
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News is history shot on the wing. The huntsmen from the Fourth Estate seek to bag only the peacock or the eagle of the swifting day.
-Gene Fowler
Skyline, 1961
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I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.
-Mahatma Gandhi
(attributed)
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If Thomas Edison invented electric light today, Dan Rather would report it on CBS News as, Candle making industry threatened.
-Newt Gingrich
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Whoever controls the media
-Allen Ginsberg
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The world is for thousands a freak show; the images flicker past and vanish; the impressions remain flat and unconnected in the soul. Thus they are easily led by the opinions of others, are content to let their impressions be shuffled and rearranged and evaluated differently.
-Johann von Goethe
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That ephemeral sheet,... the newspaper, is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.
-Edmond de Goncourt
Journal, July 1858
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Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.
-Graham Greene
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The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country.
-Judge Learned Hand, Memorial service for Justice Brandeis, December 21, 1942
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Belief is with them mechanical, voluntary: they believe what they are paid for -- they swear to that which turns to account. Do you suppose, that after years spent in this manner, they have any feeling left answering to the difference between truth and falsehood?
-William Hazlitt
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I almost wish I could be more exciting, that I could match what is happening out there to me.
-Whitney Houston
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I sometimes compare press officers to riflemen on the Somme -- mowing down wave upon wave of distortion, taking out rank upon rank of supposition, deduction and gossip.
-Bernard Ingham
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Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
-Thomas Jefferson, "Letter to Col. Edward Carrington", January 16, 1787
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No news at 4:30 a.m. is good.
-Lady Bird Johnson
A White House Diary, 1970
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Books about Media
