Media quotes
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"... the media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly."
"Jamie Kilstein and Allison Kilkenny have created an important political radio show that balances humor and unreported news. At a time when media conglomerates dominate the airwaves, independent media like Citizen Radio is vital to national discourse."
"Our yearning for democracy is accompanied by a no less profound yearning for peace. And the media also faced the task of historical engineering to establish this required truth. We therefore have phenomena called 'peace missions' and the 'peace process'. These are terms that apply to whatever the United States happens to be doing or advocating at some moment... in short, 'War is Peace'."
"One substitute for the disappearing Evil Empire (The Soviet Union) has been the threat of drug traffickers from Latin America. In early September 1989, a major government-media blitz was launched by the President. That month the AP wires carried more stories about drugs than about Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa combined. If you looked at television, every news program had a big section on how drugs were destroying our society, becoming the greatest threat to our existence, etc."
"Democracy was regarded as entering into a crisis in the 1960s. The crisis was that large segments of the population were becoming organized and active and trying to participate in the political arena."
"It is ... necessary to whip up the population in support of foreign adventures. Usually the population is pacifist, just like they were during the First World War. The public sees no reason to get involved in foreign adventures, killing, and torture. So you have to whip them up. And to whip them up you have to frighten them."
"The money in politics is a cash cow for the media."
"The book Manufacturing Consent, which I co-authored with Edward Herman, begins with a description of the structure and institutional setting of the commercial media, and then draws some rather simple-minded conclusions about what we would expect the media product to be, given these (not particularly controversial) conditions."
"I wouldn't say that the efforts of academics to critique the media's messages are "half-hearted." As far as I am aware, the efforts scarcely exist: very few even pay attention to the question."
"When something isn't constantly drummed-up by the media, [people] just don't know about it."
"Israel produces and stores chemical weapons. So therefore the US will prevent the Chemical Weapons Convention from being imposed on the Middle East. But it's necessary to evade this by misrepresenting the convention, and I think maybe 100 percent of the media, or close to it, go along. But that's a critical issue. Actually, Syria's chemical weapons were developed largely as a deterrent to Israeli nuclear weapons. Also, not mentioned."
"It is the worst atrocity underway [in Rwanda]. But it's barely in the media, and people just don't know about it. And that's quite generally true."
"I don't use the social media but I can see the effects in my own correspondence. I get a ton of correspondence. It used to be hard copy and now it's a very limited amount of actual letters people write. So it's mostly email."
"You can't mention Hezbollah in the U.S. media without putting in the context of "Iranian-supported Hezbollah." That's its name. Its name is Iranian-supported Hezbollah. It gets Iranian support. But you can mention Israel without saying US-supported Israel. So this is more tacit propaganda."
"The Media are corporations so... It's the concentrations of private power which have an enormous, not total control, but enormous influence over Congress and the White House and that's increasing sharply with sharp concentration of private power and escalating cost of elections and so on."
"Anarchism means all sort of things to different people but the traditional anarchists' movements assumed that there'd be a highly organized society, just one organized from below with direct participation and so on. Actually, one piece of the media confusion has a basis because there really are two different strands in the occupy movement, both important, but different."
"I don't claim to know a lot about Mexico, but I did talk to quite a number of left Mexican intelectuals, and they all said the same thing. That there's a lot of popular, kind of, concern and activism, but it is very fragmented. That the groups have very specific, narrow agendas and they don't interact and cooperate with one another. Ok, that's something you have to overcome to build a mass popular movement. And that's, media can help, but they also benefit from it."
"Just media alone is not enough. You have to have organization."
"My grandchildren are on social media all the time, and they think they have friends. But it's not what I would've called a friend, ever."
"Unfortunately, the media, which are not at all reluctant to act in their own self-interest, have succeeded in equating reform in the public mind with further restrictions on just about everyone else's freedom of political speech."
