"(Media question to Beatles during first U.S. tour 1964)
'How do you find America?'
'Turn left at Greenland.'"
— Ringo Starr

"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves."
— Edward R. Murrow

""Whoever controls the media, controls the mind" "
— Jim Morrison

"All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that's an alibi for my ignorance."
— Will Rogers

"I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories. "
— Dave Barry

"The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty."
— James Madison

"The biases the media has are much bigger than conservative or liberal. They're about getting ratings, about making money, about doing stories that are easy to cover."
— Al Franken

"Books are better than television, the internet, or the computer for educating and maintaining freedom.
Books matter because they state ideas and then attempt to thoroughly prove them. They have an advantage precisely because they slow down the process, allowing the reader to internalize, respond, react and transform. The ideas in books matter because time is taken to establish truth, and because the reader must take the time to consider each idea and either accept it or, if he rejects it, to think through sound reasons for doing so. A nation of people who write and read is a nation with the attention span to earn an education and free society if they choose."
— Oliver DeMille

"Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no 'normal,' because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously. "
— Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)

"There's nothing happy about love at all!! I would rather have not known real love... if it hurts this much."
— Chitose Yagami (Fall In Love Like a Comic Vol. 1)

"Seeing a murder on television... can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some."
— Alfred Hitchcock

"Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?"
— Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)

"Do you know we are being led to
Slaughters by placid admirals

& that fat slow generals are getting
Obscene on young blood

Do you know we are ruled by t.v.
"
— Jim Morrison (Jim Morrison's an American Prayer)

"Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions."
— Edward R. Murrow

"If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable."
— Edward R. Murrow

"Despite the variety and the differences, and however much we proclaim the contrary, what the media produce is neither spontaneous nor completely “free:” “news” does not just happen, pictures and ideas do not merely spring from reality into our eyes and minds, truth is not directly available, we do not have unrestrained variety at our disposal.

For like all modes of communication, television, radio, and newspapers observe certain rules and conventions to get things across intelligibly, and it is these, often more than the reality being conveyed, that shape the material delivered by the media. "
— Edward W. Said

"The media are so compelling and so filled with sex, they have become our true sex educators."
— from Sex Sells!

"In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant."
— David F. Wells (No Place for Truth or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?)

"We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late. "
— Edward R. Murrow

"Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about."
— Cory Doctorow

"And next time we hear someone saying something like, 'We are pursuing this strategy because other strategies, when we had considered them, we concluded that, in terms of overall effectiveness, they were not sound strategies, which is why we enacted the one we are now embarked upon, which our enemies would like to see us fail, due to they hate freedom,' we will wait to see if the anchorperson cracks up, or chokes back a sob of disgust, and if he or she does not, we'll feel a bit insane, and therefore less confident, and therefore more passive."
— George Saunders (The Braindead Megaphone)

"The student of media soon comes to expect the New Media of any period whatever to be classed as 'pseudo' by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be. "
— Marshall McLuhan

"Was wir über unsere Gesellschaft, ja über die Welt, in der wir leben, wissen, wissen wir durch die Massenmedien"
— Niklas Luhmann (The Reality of the Mass Media)

"Das Internet ist das erste Medium, das diese Grenze [zwischen Publikation und Kommunikation] aufhebt."
— Thomas Knüwer

"Obwohl diese afrikanischen Militärbanden oft nicht größer oder mächtiger sind als die organisierten kriminellen Banden in Asien oder Osteuropa, wird über ihre Aktivitäten in den Medien - sogar in den westlichen Medien - unter der Rubrik Politik (Geschehen aus aller Welt) respektvoll berichtet, statt unter der Rubrik Verbrechen."
— J.M. Coetzee (Tagebuch eines schlimmen Jahres)

"Jeder ist immer erreichbar. Die ganze Welt beschleunigt sich, alles ist dringend, und wo alles dringend ist, ist nichts mehr dringend, und damit schlittern wir in eine Bedeutungslosigkeit hinein."
— Joseph Weizenbaum

"In the moral realm, there is very little consensus left in Western countries over the proper basis of moral behavior. And because of the power of the media, for millions of men and women the only venue where moral questions are discussed and weighed is the talk show, where more often than not the primary aim is to entertain, even shock, not to think. When Geraldo and Oprah become the arbiters of public morality, when the opinion of the latest media personality is sought on everything from abortion to transvestites, when banality is mistaken for profundity because uttered by a movie star or a basketball player, it is not surprising that there is less thought than hype. Oprah shapes more of the nation's grasp of right and wrong than most of the pulpits in the land. Personal and social ethics have been removed from the realms of truth and structures of thoughts; they have not only been relativized, but they have been democratized and trivialized."
— D.A. Carson (The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism)

"Von der Pressefreiheit hängt praktisch jede andere Freiheit ab."
— Salvador de Madariaga

"Die veröffentlichte Meinung [...] bildet nur einen kleinen Ausschnitt der öffentlichen Meinung ab."
— Sascha Lobo (Wir nennen es Arbeit)

"Das Web 2.0 bedeutet vor allem, dass die soziale Reichweite des Einzelnen größer ist als die Reichweite der eigenen Stimme."
— Sascha Lobo (Wir nennen es Arbeit)

"When the New York Times scratches its head, get ready for total baldness as you tear out your hair."
— Christopher Hitchens

"Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."
— Guy Billout

"People say conversation is a lost art; how often I have wished it were."
— Edward R. Murrow

"We are in the same tent as the clowns and the freaks-that's show business."
— Edward R. Murrow

"Jede Propaganda ist so gefährlich wie die Dummheit, auf die sie trifft."
— Serdar Somuncu

"Dein Wissen hat keine Bedeutung, wenn niemand anderes weiß, dass du weißt."
— Persius

"Was man wünscht, das glaubt auch jeder."
— Demosthenes

"Wie unwirksam sind doch aufrichtige Reden!"
— Hiob

"[D]ie Leute [lesen] nichts, was sie nicht interessiert, und wenn sie etwas interessier[t], [sind] sie auch reif dafür."
— Isabel Allende (La casa de los espíritus)

""...if only the press were to do its duty, or but a tenth of its duty, this hellish system could not go on."


"
— William Cobbett 1830

"Einen guten Journalisten erkennt man daran, dass er sich nicht gemein macht mit einer Sache, auch nicht mit einer guten Sache; dass er überall dabei ist, aber nirgendwo dazugehört"
— Hanns Joachim Friedrichs

"Oh, he shouldn't be surprised, he's a Marxist and has nothing but contempt for the bourgeois capitalist press, yet paradoxically he is also somehow an Americanist and a believer in Science and Freedom and History and Reason, and it dismays him to see cruelty politely concealed in data, madness taken for granted and even honored, truth buried away and rotting in all that ex cathedra trivia--my God! something terrible is about to happen, and they have time to editorialize on mustaches, advertise pink cigarettes for weddings, and report on a lost parakeet! Ah, sometimes he just wants to ram the goddamn thing with his head in an all-out frontal attack, wants to destroy all this so-called history so that history can start again."
— Robert Coover (The Public Burning)

"The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not?'"
— Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations)

"Until recently, 'the news' has meant to different things - events that are newsworthy, and events covered by the press."
— Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations)

"Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move."
— Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations)

"[T]he category of 'consumer' is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity."
— Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations)

"The low cost of aggregating information also allowed the formalization of sharing [...]."
— Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations)