"Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind."
— General William Westmoreland
United States Army
"In war, truth is the first casualty."
— Aeschylus
525-456 B.C.
"Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the [U.S.] media."
— Noam Chomsky
M.I.T. professor of linguistics
prolific author & U.S. foreign policy critic
co-author
Manufacturing Consent
"The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity — much less dissent.
"Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions..."
— Gore Vidal
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
"Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.
"When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that, as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and most popular."
— David Hume Of the First Principles of Government
1758
quoted in Gore Vidal's
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
"The owners and managers of the press determine which person, which facts, which version of the facts, and which ideas shall reach the public."
Report by the Commission on Freedom of the Press
quoted in
Democracy for the Few,
by Michael Parenti
and Don't Blame the People, by Robert Cirino
"Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness."
— George Orwell
author of the book 1984
"When I was Times bureau chief in Washington, I was a member of the League of Gentlemen [i.e., the established elite]; otherwise I never would have been bureau chief. Time after time, good reporters ... complained about not being able to get stories in the paper. And time after time I said to them, 'You're just not going to get that in the New York Times... it's too reliant on your judgement rather than on official judgement, it's too complex, it contradicts the official record more flagrantly than the conventions of daily journalism allow.'"
— Tom Wicker New York Times columnist Guardian (London)
February 13, 1985
quoted in
Democracy for the Few,
by Michael Parenti
and "'League of Gentlemen' Rates Media," by Kevin Kelly
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"Following the same course that virtually every other major industry has in the last two decades, a relentless series of mergers and corporate takeovers has consolidated control of the media into the hands of a few corporate behemoths.
"The result has been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to the American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state."
— David McGowan
from the introduction to
Derailing Democracy
"Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play."
— Joseph Goebbels
Nazi Propaganda Minister
"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, as an independent press. You know it and I know it.
"There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.
"If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.
"The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell the country for his daily bread.
"You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press.
"We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men.
"We are intellectual prostitutes."
— John Swinton New York Times editor
in a speech before the New York Press Club
1953
"The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them."
— Albert Einstein
letter to Sigmund Freud
July 30, 1932
"...the corporate ownership of the country has absolute control of the populist pulpit — 'the media' — as well as of the schoolroom."
— Gore Vidal
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
"A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government."
— Kenneth Boulding
University of Michigan
quoted in
The Hidden Persuaders
"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology."
— Michael Parenti
Political scientist and author of
Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media
"The U.S. Government spends more than $400,000,000 per year to employ more than 8000 workers to create propaganda favourable to the United States. The result: 90 films per year, twelve magazines in 22 languages, and 800 hours of Voice of America programming in 37 languages with an estimated audience of 75 million listeners — all describing the 'virtues' of the American way."
— Pratkanis and Aronson Age of Propaganda: the everyday use and abuse of persuasion
1992
"The [Central Intelligence] Agency has owned outright more than 240 Media operations around the world, including newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, radio and television stations, and wire services, and has partially controlled many more."
— Michael Parenti
Political scientist and author of
Democracy for the Few and
Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media
"We paid $3 billion for these television stations. We will decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is."
— station manager
of a Murdoch/News Corp.-owned station in Florida
The station manager is alleged to have said this to two of the station's on-air reporters, Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, when they refused to water down their investigative report on Monsanto's bovine growth hormone. When the reporters continued to resist management-ordered story changes which they felt were false and misleading, they were fired.
"In the media, the world is turned upside down. The Contras and the KLA are "democratizers"; the lethal sanctions against (the people of) Iraq exist to deliver its people from their dictator; the destruction of Yugoslavia through aerial bombardment of civilians and their infrastructure is a "humanitarian intervention."
"The great masses of the people... more easily fall victims to a big lie than a small one"
— Adolf Hitler Mein Kampf
"You furnish the pictures and I will furnish the war."
— William Randolph Hearst
Hearst was the owner of a chain of grossly dishonest, jingoistic newspapers. He had sent the famous artist Frederic Remington to Cuba to provide sketches for American newspaper readers of the Cuban insurrection against Spanish rule. When Remington arrived he found no insurrection happening. He wired Hearst, saying: "Everything quiet. No trouble here. There will be no war." Hearst wired back the notorious reply above.
"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."
— Mark Twain The Mysterious Stranger
1916
"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
in the book 1984
"One of the intentions of corporate-controlled media is to instill in people a sense of disempowerment, of immobilization and paralysis. Its outcome is to turn you into good consumers. It is to keep people isolated, to feel that there is no possibility for social change."
— David Barsamian
journalist and publisher
"History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people."
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
emancipator
"The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth."
— Aldous Huxley
"We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest — which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors would all become wolves."
— Thomas Jefferson
political visionary
3rd U.S. President
unrepentant slave-owner
"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America."
— Alexis de Tocqueville
French political thinker, traveller
author of Democracy in America
1805-1859
"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it...."
— General Douglas MacArthur
1957
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
— H. L. Mencken
"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."
— Herman Goering
Nazi Air Force (Luftwaffe) commander
at the Nuremberg Trials
"...the rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious.
"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly...it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."
— Joseph Goebbels
Nazi Propaganda Minister
"How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think."
— Adolf Hitler
"Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity... and I'm not sure about the former."
"This is the first in a series of pieces that will attempt to answer several questions: Why do the American mass media play such a foul role? Who are the major personalities? Who owns the media? What is their modus operandi?"
"It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it."
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