Mass Media Quotes

• The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.

  Malcolm X

  Wisdom, Powerful, Print Media

  "The Awakening of Global Consciousness: A Guide to Self-Realization and Spirituality". Book by Dr. Jawara D. King, p.199, 2010.

  1064 Copy quote

  Show source

• All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarise that society. We can brutalise it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.

  William Bernbach

  Business, Media, Use

  21 Copy quote

• Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we’re born?

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Media, Desire, Culture

  11 Copy quote

• We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

  Don DeLillo

  Book, Media, Age

  "I don't know America anymore". Interview with Christoph Amend, Georg Diez, perival.com. October 11, 2007.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The greatest power of the mass media is the power to ignore. The worst thing about this power is that you may not even know you're using it.

  Sam Smith

  Media, Democracy, May

  22 Copy quote

• What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

  W. H. Auden

  Art, Media, Political

  "The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays" by W. H. Auden, ("The Poet & The City"), (p. 83), 1962.

  31 Copy quote

  Show source

• Media literacy is not just important, it's absolutely critical. It's going to make the difference between whether kids are a tool of the mass media or whether the mass media is a tool for kids to use.

  Linda Ellerbee

  Kids, Media, Differences

  40 Copy quote

• 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

  Media, Democracy, United States

  Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault (2006). “The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature”, The New Press

  97 Copy quote

  Show source

• This generation is burning the mass media to the ground.

  Julian Assange

  Media, This Generation, Generations

  "WikiLeaks' Assange addresses Splendour crowd". www.abc.net.au. July 30, 2011.

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Mass media provides the essential link between the individual and the demands of the technological society.

  Jacques Ellul

  Media, Links, Demand

  14 Copy quote

• If you step back from it and really think about what the mass media does on a global scale, the most significant thing it does is coordinate behaviour.

  Daniel Pinchbeck

  Thinking, Media, Significant Things

  22 Copy quote

• The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.

  Christopher Lasch

  Believe, Media, Addiction

  Christopher Lasch (1991). “The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics”, p.521, W. W. Norton & Company

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• Technology brought in the mass media and technology is now taking it away.

  David Hockney

  Technology, Media, Mass

  9 Copy quote

• It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale.

  Jacques Ellul

  Media, Technique, Use

  "Jan. 6, 1912: Birth of the Supreme Tech Skeptic", www.wired.com. January 5, 2009.

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• Cinema is mass media, it is both overtly gross and exciting. It is our great mirror of society.

  Nicolas Winding Refn

  Mirrors, Media, Cinema

  Source: www.hollywoodchicago.com

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses.

  Adolf Hitler

  Art, Lying, Emotional

  20 Copy quote

• I operate under the assumption that the mass media will never be accurate. ... It operates with the objective to simplify and exaggerate, which is exactly what Walt Disney told his cartoonists.

  Michael Crichton

  Media, Assumption, Propaganda

  10 Copy quote

• All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Media, Perception, Arbitrary

  Marshall McLuhan (1964). “Understanding media: the extensions of man”

  47 Copy quote

  Show source

• Because of a mass media more interested in gossip and sensationalism than real issues, I would say a vast majority of the American public doesn't have a clue about how the Congress functions and what goes on.

  Bernie Sanders

  Real, Media, Issues

  Interview with Ruth Conniff, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. December 1, 2005.

  41 Copy quote

  Show source

• The world has progressed to the point where it's most powerful force is public opinion. And I believe that in this world it is not the great book or epic play, as once was the case, that will shape that opinion, but those who understand mass media and the techniques of mass persuasion...We must not just believe in what we sell. We must sell what we believe in. And we must pour a vast energy into those causes.

  William Bernbach

  Powerful, Believe, Book

  25 Copy quote

• It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.

  Christopher Lasch

  Reality, Media, Logic

  Christopher Lasch (1991). “The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics”, p.519, W. W. Norton & Company

  60 Copy quote

  Show source

• The American mass media have achieved what American political might could not: World domination.

  Akbar S. Ahmed

  Media, Political, World

  47 Copy quote

• To find something comparable, you have to go back 500 years to the printing press, the birth of mass media – which, incidentally, is what really destroyed the old world of kings and aristocracies. Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it’s the people who are taking control.

  Rupert Murdoch

  Kings, Technology, Media

  "His Space". Interview with Spencer Reiss, www.wired.com. July 1, 2006.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies all this is indispensably necessary.

  George Orwell

  Truth, Lying, Believe

  34 Copy quote

• People in the mass media tend more and more every day to look and act like elected and appointed officials.

  L. Neil Smith

  Media, People, Looks

  14 Copy quote