Media Distortion Quotes

“Never judge someone's character based on the words of another. Instead, study the motives behind the words of the person casting the bad judgment. An honest woman can sell tangerines all day and remain a good person until she dies, but there will always be naysayers who will try to convince you otherwise. Perhaps this woman did not give them something for free, or at a discount. Perhaps too, that she refused to stand with them when they were wrong — or just stood up for something she felt was right. And also, it could be that some bitter women are envious of her, or that she rejected the advances of some very proud men. Always trust your heart. If the Creator stood before a million men with the light of a million lamps, only a few would truly see him because truth is already alive in their hearts. Truth can only be seen by those with truth in them. He who does not have Truth in his heart, will always be blind to her.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Until you realize how easy it is for your mind to be manipulated, you remain the puppet of someone else's game.”
― Evita Ochel

“The basic distortions in the media are not innocent errors, for they are not random; rather they move in the same overall direction again and again, favoring management over labor, corporatism over anti-corporatism, the affluent over the poor, private enterprise over socialism, Whites over Blacks, males over females, officialdom over protesters, conventional politics over dissidence, anticommunism and arms-race militarism over disarmament, national chauvinism over internationalism, US dominance of the Third World over revolutionary or populist nationalist change. The press does many things and serves many functions but its major role, its irreducible responsibility, is to continually recreate a view of reality supportive of existing social and economic class power.”
― Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media

“The court of public opinion moves much faster than the law.”
― T.E. Carter, I Stop Somewhere

“Take a little thought experiment. Imagine all the rampage school shooters in Littleton, Colorado; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; and Jonesboro, Arkansas; now imagine they were black girls from poor families who lived instead in Chicago, New Haven, Newark, Philadelphia, or Providence. Can you picture the national debate, the headlines, the hand-wringing? There is no doubt we’d be having a national debate about inner-city poor black girls. The entire focus would be on race, class, and gender. The media would doubtless invent a new term for their behavior, as with wilding two decades ago. We’d hear about the culture of poverty, about how living in the city breeds crime and violence. We’d hear some pundits proclaim some putative natural tendency among blacks toward violence. Someone would likely even blame feminism for causing girls to become violent in a vain imitation of boys.

Yet the obvious fact that virtually all the rampage school shooters were middle-class white boys barely broke a ripple in the torrent of public discussion. This uniformity cut across all other differences among the shooters: some came from intact families, others from single-parent homes; some boys had acted violently in the past, and others were quiet and unassuming; some boys also expressed rage at their parents (two killed their parents the same morning), and others seemed to live in happy families.”
― Michael S. Kimmel, Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era

“Beyond creating unrealistic ideals and distorting our idea of what women actually look like, media images of women do another type of damage as well. They are one of the main sources of the sexual objectification of women, constantly conveying that women's bodies exist for others to evaluate and use at will. When we see women portrayed as objects in media imagery, it's a reminder of how often women are valued only for their bodies. The message of these images is clear:You exist for being looked at.”
― Renee Engeln, Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women

“Unless you have a free press in your country, there is no need to buy newspapers and there is no need to watch the news because there is no need to listen to the lies! And you already have one real information: You are being deceived by the people you are governed! This is an enough information for you!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“(Talking about the movement to deny the prevalence and effects of adult sexual exploitation of children)
So what does this movement consist of? Who are the movers and shakers? Well molesters are in it, of course. There are web pages telling them how to defend themselves against accusations, to retain confidence about their ‘loving and natural’ feelings for children, with advice on what lawyers to approach, how to complain, how to harass those helping their children. Then there’s the Men’s Movements, their web pages throbbing with excitement if they find ‘proof’ of conspiracy between feminists, divorcing wives and therapists to victimise men, fathers and husbands.
Then there are journalists. A few have been vitally important in the US and Britain in establishing the fightback, using their power and influence to distort the work of child protection professionals and campaign against children’s testimony. Then there are other journalists who dance in and out of the debates waggling their columns behind them, rarely observing basic journalistic manners, but who use this debate to service something else – a crack at the welfare state, standards, feminism, ‘touchy, feely, post-Diana victimhood’. Then there is the academic voice, landing in the middle of court cases or inquiries, offering ‘rational authority’. Then there is the government. During the entire period of discovery and denial, not one Cabinet minister made a statement about the prevalence of sexual abuse or the harm it caused.
Finally there are the ‘retractors’. For this movement to take off, it had to have ‘human interest’ victims – the accused – and then a happy ending – the ‘retractors’. We are aware that those ‘retractors’ whose parents trail them to newspapers, television studios and conferences are struggling. Lest we forget, they recanted under palpable pressure.”
― Beatrix Campbell, Stolen Voices: The People and Politics Behind the Campaign to Discredit Childhood Testimony

“Corporate media rarely reports the fact that police internal affairs uphold hardly any complaints from the masses.”
― Steven Magee

“Idealized media images of women are far from being theonlyimportant target when it comes to our beauty-sick culture, but their sheer ubiquity means we can't underestimate their impact. We also cannot pretend that what we see in the media doesn't shape our thoughts and behaviors. It might be tempting to think that your mind is locked behind some protective wall, safe from the influence of the media onslaught, but that's not how brains work. We areallaffected by these images. Their influence is insidious, and there is no magic force field to keep it out.”
― Renee Engeln, Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women

“In dictatorships the media is controlled by the State. In democracies the media is controlled by wealthy individuals with political affiliations. Objective media and journalists simply do not exist in the mainstream.”
― Robert Black

“With all the risk and danger television sprays at us each day like tear gas, it occurs to me they should simply open each evening's show by saying," Welcome to the Channel Two News; we're very surprised you made it through another day.”
― Thom Rutledge

“The picture of the world that's presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality. The truth of the matter is buried under edifice after edifice of lies upon lies. It's all been a marvellous success from the point of view in deterring the threat of democracy, achieved under conditions of freedom, which is extremely interesting.”
― Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda

“The hypothesis advanced by the propaganda model, excluded from debate as unthinkable, is that in dealing with the American wars in Indochina, the media were" unmindful ", but highly" patriotic "in the special and misleading sense that they kept -- and keep -- closely to the perspective of official Washington and the closely related corporate elite, in conformity to the general" journalistic-literary-political culture "from which" the left "(meaning dissident opinion that questions jingoist assumptions) is virtually excluded. The propaganda model predicts that this should be generally true not only of the choice of topics covered and the way they are covered, but also, and far more crucially, of the general background of the presuppositions within which the issues are framed and the news presented. Insofar as there is debate among dominant elites, it will be reflected within the media, which in this narrow sense, may adopt an" adversarial stance "with regard to those holding office, reflecting elite dissatisfaction with current policy. Otherwise the media will depart from elite consensus only rarely and in limited ways. Even when large parts of the general public break free of the premises of the doctrinal system, as finally happened during the Indochina wars, real understanding based upon an alternative conception of the evolving history can be developed only with considerable effort by the most diligent and skeptical. And such understanding as can be reached through serious and often individual effort will be difficult to sustain or apply elsewhere, an extremely important matter for those who are truly concerned with democracy at home and" the influence of democracy abroad, "in the real sense of these words.”
― Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“the media, at least in the U.S., tends to focus on pain pill use, abuse, and addiction by people who do not have chronic pain.
Even if these stories offhandedly mention that these pills are used to treat pain in people whose physical pain does not go away, however, the stories of those who use pain medicine responsibly -- or, worse, accused of drug-seeking behavior because they need certain types of pills for chronic pain -- are usually overshadowed by the “How can we prevent pain pill addiction?” concern, instead of asking, “How can we treat chronic pain more effectively?”
― Anna Hamilton

“The problem with the media - is that if you talk to it, it will use things against you. And that if you don't talk to it, it will use things against you”
― lauren klarfeld

“Today a story is not told it's sold.”
― Amit Abraham

“Don’t let the politicians bought and sold in the political markets, the chosen “analysts”, the assigned “experts”, the co-opted writers on the Empire’s payroll tell you what is newsworthy. Don’t listen to all those who are more interested in fame, in standing on the podiums of arrogance and sitting to dine at the tables of triviality tell you what is newsworthy.”
― Louis Yako

“As information and voice amplification become the new symbols of power, those who would assume control of society have moved to hoard voice amplification and control the message received by the public in new ways.”
― Heather Marsh

“The powerful can overpower the power of the pen but then they cannot write with water.”
― Amit Abraham

“Men have always fought their misery with dreams. Although dreams were once powerful, they have been made puerile by the movies, radio and newspapers. Among many betrayals, this is the worst.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“Each of us is a massive composite figure. We are constantly filtering a barrage of sounds and visual images. Newspapers headlines scream to gain our attention. The radio blasts out its top forty. Billboards proclaim the newest film stars. Fashion magazines tell us how to dress and act. Each day sprouts its insider news tidbits. Each news day the media mashes another international or domestic crisis into our mental pulp and soufflés the macramé of political scandal or social untidiness into edible sound bites for us mentally to digest. Inside each of us resides shavings from this visual and electronic onslaught. An unseemly deluge of external stimuli shapes our ego formation.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“One of the greatest responsibilities for the people of our time is to accept everything that he hears in the pro-government media as a lie and to investigate the truth from independent sources personally!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Just before she was allowed to go to Buck, Blanche was photographed at least three times by Herb Schwartz of the Des Moines Register. The location was about one quarter of a mile from where Buck and Blanche were apprehended. Blanche is being held by Sheriff Loren Forbes in all three shots. In two of the shots she is standing quietly, looking toward Buck, who is lying on the ground nearby with a group of armed men stooping over him. In the third shot, which has been widely published, Blanche is struggling with Forbes and looking directly at the camera, screaming dramatically. In his notes, Schwartz commented that Blanche, in her semiblind state, saw him raising his camera and apparently thought it was a gun and that he was about to shoot Buck. Blanche is screaming at Schwartz.”
― John Neal Phillips, My Life with Bonnie and Clyde

“People in the news, consumers of the news and those who report it, seldom see things the same.”
― Canty J

“Gone are the days when media reported now they are reported.”
― Amit Abraham

“Breaking News - The Government Has FIXED UP everything.”
― Amit Abraham

“The media is no longer the message. It's the malware.”
― Michael P. Naughton

“The media is the malware.”
― Michael P. Naughton

“The Invaders are in your very midst!’
The Newsman admits.
The People
start having fits
after paying him handsomely
for his services.”
― Roy Duffield, Bacchus Against the Wall