c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The public's dilemma is to know how to consume the news with an ability to extract opinion from the simple facts and evidence... The best solution to the fact/opinion dilemma is to acquire more diverse information across the ideological and geological divide. If you find yourself relying on one source of information for the news, whether right or left, you are likely to be exposed to more opinion that reinforces rather than challenges your own.
— Nancy Snow, Information War: American Propaganda, Free Speech and Opinion Control Since 9-11
Nowadays, it is true, we have mass media and expert propaganda to spread suspicion and fear. But the people I mean—and they form the great majority—are not suspicious and fearful, as many educated and more influential persons are. Propaganda has not made them accept the Bomb. We protesters, though we may have won over some of their sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, have not made them reject it. They remain profoundly, astonishingly, shockingly indifferent.
— J.B. Priestley, Man and Time
A civilian-based diplomacy supports noncommercial, nonprofit, and publicly-subsidized media to counteract the corporate-controlled, for-profit, private media that dominate political discourse; and works to place media control, ownership, and lobbying at the center of public policy debate.
— Nancy Snow, Propaganda, Inc.: Selling America's Culture to the World
Listen, dis foreign TV channels dey spoil de image of our country. Dese white stations dey make billions of dollars to sell your war and blood to de world… We no bad like dis. OK, why dem no dey show corpses of deir white people during crisis for TV? Abi, people no dey kill for America or Europe?”“You dey speak grammar!” someone shouted. “Wetin concern us wid America and Europe? Abeg, give us cable TV.”“Remove dis toilet pictures!” said another.“So our barracks be toilet now?” the police answered. "What an insult!“ "You na mad mad police,” Monica said.“Ok, cable TV no be for free anymore!” the police said.“But it’s our pictures we are watching on cable TV,” Madam Aniema said. “Why should we pay you to see ourselves and our people?”The police answered, “Because government dey complain say cable TV dey misrepresent dis religious crisis.
— Uwem Akpan, Say You're One of Them
Because the Empire controls the media, we can turn any news to the Emperor's advantage.
— Daniel Wallace, Star Wars: Imperial Handbook
How would we flood village and city with our information? The people must learn how well I govern them. How would they know if we didn't tell them?
— Frank Herbert, Dune
The journal is written to everyone and thus to no one.
— Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
Simultaneously, in the most complete ambiguity, they [media] propagate the brutal charm of the terrorist act, they are themselves terrorists, insofar as they themselves march to the tune of seduction.
— Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
It is now certain that the public does know. It is not so certain that the public does care.
— G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography
Behavior was better when cinemas were opulent.
— George F. Will, The Woven Figure: Conservatism and America's Fabric
There is a blackout in media coverage of issues concerning whales and dolphins in Japan, with the exception of the government's viewpoint. It is simply amazing how little good information (and how much bad information) the public in Japan gets about the worldwide controversy over whaling and dolphin killing, all because the media bows to the wishes of the Japan Fisheries Agency.
— Richard O'Barry, Behind the Dolphin smile: One Man's Campaign to Protect the World's Dolphins
In the absence of a confirmed fact, rumors are usually sanctified as the truth. And that is what goes out there in the media.
— Nitin   Sharma, From Tiggie, With Love
In so far as the purported use of "violence" by the Animal Liberation Front in the furtherance of its fundamental mission is concerned; The fact of the matter is that violence cannot be committed against an inanimate object.
— Will Hazlitt
If you consume animal derived foods or use other animal derived products you are by no stretch of the imagination an "environmentalist." You are a rank hypocrite.
— Will Hazlitt
Television news is akin to audible wallpaper.
— George F. Will, The Woven Figure: Conservatism and America's Fabric
Society tells my students that people like them should aspire to prison the same way I understood I would go to college. They only listen to media that reinforces what they’ve been told all their lives: that they are worthless and that they will die or be incarcerated before they reach twenty-five.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Juvenile Justice: A Reference Handbook, 2nd Edition: A Reference Handbook
[I]n 1919, 1920 and 1921, the whole Israelite press stormed the Romanian state unleashing everywhere chaos and exhorting to violence against the regime, the form of government, the Church, the Romanian order, the national idea, patriotism. Now, as if by magic (in 1936), the same press, led exactly by the same people, has turned into a protector of the state order and its laws, and declares itself 'against violence', and we have become the 'enemies of the country', the 'right-wing extremists', 'in the pay and in the service of the enemy of Romanicity', and, before long, we will hear even this: that we are sponsored by the Jews.
— Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
The democratization of media means that anyone with a phone can become a celebrity. Our short-sighted focus on self-esteem in children means that everyone gets a trophy, universities and education are “brands” instead of places of learning, standardized testsare used to assess wisdom, and grade inflation is rampant. The tribe has been replaced with followers and likes. Our economy, our bodies, our health, our children, and frankly our psyches are in big trouble.
— Ramani Durvasula, Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist
Everything we hate about the media today was present at its creation: its corrupt or craven practitioners, its easy manipulation by the powerful, its capacity for propagating lies, its penchant for amplifying rage. Also present was everything we admire and require: factual information, penetrating analysis, probing investigation, truth spoken to power.
— Brooke Gladstone
There's a long-standing debate in the media biz over whether the news outlets should give the public what it wants, or what it needs. This debate presupposes that media execs actually know what it wants or needs. And that there actually is a unitary "public.
— Brooke Gladstone, The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media
Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it— say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken—or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.
— Sontag, Susan
Being a spectator of calamities taking place in an other country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half's worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists.
— Sontag, Susan
The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
The English-language press in India supports the project of corporate globalization fully. It has no time for dispossession and drought and farmers' debts, the ravages that the corporate globalization project is wreaking on the poor of India. So to suddenly turn around and condemn the riots is a typical middle-class response. Let's support everything that leads to the conditions in which the massacre takes place, but when the killing starts, you recoil in middle-class horror, and say, "Oh, that's not very nice. Can't we be more civilized?
— Arundhati Roy, The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy
They were interchangeable tools, and the catchy phrases continued without abatement.
— Robert A. Caro
He saw the article...which was not an expression of ideas, but a bucket of slime emptied in public—an article that did not contain a single fact, not even an invented one, but poured a stream of sneers and adjectives in which nothing was clear except the filthy malice of denouncing without considering proof necessary.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
The networks at their worst (were) at once greedy and timid.
— David Halberstam, The Powers That Be
Reality confounds image.
— Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians
Fifties advertising was a dogmatic art, to the point of pretending to be a science.
— Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
The type of journalism that relies on the reporter's notion of what does or doesn't "seem" correct or controversial is self-indulgent and irresponsible. It gives credence to the belief that we can intuit our way through all the various decisions we need to make in our lives and it validates the notion that our feelings are a more reliable barometer of reality than the facts.
— Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear
Perhaps the media may not always be telling what to think, but it is always telling you what to think about.
— James Rozoff
What remains of people is what media can store and communicate.
— Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900
I was showing early symptoms of becoming a professional baseball man. I was lying to the press.
— Roger Kahn, Good Enough to Dream
Information or allegations reflecting negatively on individuals or groups seen less sympathetically by the intelligentsia pass rapidly into the public domain with little scrutiny and much publicity. Two of the biggest proven hoaxes of our time have involved allegations of white men gang-raping a black woman-- first the Tawana Brawley hoax of 1987 and later the false rape charges against three Duke University students in 2006. In both cases, editorial indignation rang out across the land, without a speck of evidence to substantiate either of these charges. Moreover, the denunciations were not limited to the particular men accused, but were often extended to society at large, of whom these men were deemed to be symptoms or 'the tip of the iceberg.' In both cases, the charges fit a pre-existing vision, and that apparently made mundane facts unneces
— Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society
Ah, sir, that's just mean. She's not a Victoria's Secret model. but she's pretty in her way.
— Dean Koontz, Odd Apocalypse
He picked up the paper and read the article; it was just one of many he had read lately that portrayed the poor in an awful light. The badge had now become the symbol of the unemployed, the sick, the disabled, and the most vulnerable. Badger had noticed that the media, just like that newspaper, swirled around anybody who they deemed too lazy or too stupid to work, and it seemed, people believed what they read.
— Paul Howsley, The Year of the Badgers
Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Unfortunately reality has no advertising budget.
— Daniel Suarez, Freedom™
Trust your own reason and your own logic, not your own media!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The cost of independence has dropped.
— Jeff Jarvis, What Would Google Do?
(Everyone, I guess, sees their position as the neutral one and everyone else's position as biassed. I wonder why 177 minutes of the Today programme is completely secular; you feel horribly excluded by 3 minutes of Thought for Today. I see a sinister anti-religious bias when David Attenborough goes through a whole series without ever once aying "On the other hand maybe God made it all"; you feel that 30 minutes of hymn singing on Sunday evening amounts to theocratic oppression.)
— Andrew Rilstone, Where Dawkins Went Wrong
You need editors, not brand managers,who will push the envelope to make [a brand media property] go forward.
— Seth Godin
Media is an assemblage of tools with which to expand an audience's conception of what "the world" is to such and extent that their own lives and capabilities seem utterly insignificant; a means of psychological warfare by which people are overloaded with information and desensitized to their own and others' suffering; the sum of all means by which human beings reduce the infinite complexity of reality to a dead-end maze of abstractions.
— CrimethInc., Contradictionary
Freedom of the press can never be the licence to say anything one desires. Freedom of the press is not the freedom to slander and attack and must never be used to fight other people’s wars. It does not mean manipulating a story into speaking your views. One might think it common sense but in the world of journalism a lot of what makes sense is lost to the lure of favouritism, greed and fame. Sadly, in this truth-telling business truth is hard to find.
— Aysha Taryam
Part of the problem is that people at our school don't listen. They just put on the headphones and tune out the world. It's intimidating.
— Alexandra Robbins, The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School
...the ravenous monsters men called reporters
—  sub-human vermin who feed off misery and created it wherever they went.
History used to be written by the winners. Now it is distorted and distributed by the winners' media.
— Ziad K. Abdelnour, Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics
To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.”—Letter to John Norvell, 14 June 1807[Works 10:417--18]
— Thomas Jefferson, Works of Thomas Jefferson. Including The Jefferson Bible, Autobiography and The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Illustrated), with Notes on Virginia, Parliamentary ... more.
More voices means less trust in any given voice.
— Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You
I think that the media and its influencers send out a negative message to young girls these days, when it comes to the relationship between power and money. The message that young girls receive these days, from watching reality t.v. shows and such, is that the more money you spend, the more powerful you are. But I'd like young girls everywhere to know that it's not about the money that you spend; but what it's really about is the money that you have! Financial power lies in actually having money and your intelligence is determined by how you spend it. And it's not even about buying only what you need, because we should have the things that we want, too, not only the things that we need! But it's more about knowing the value of material things because without the knowledge of the value, things aren't going to make you happy, because there's always something more that you can buy! So you've got to know how to buy what's really going to make you happy and not just buy things for the sake of spending.
— C. JoyBell C.
I don’t talk about my personal life so they [the media] had to make one up for me.
— Taylor Swift
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.
— Thomas Jefferson, Memoirs, Correspondence And Private Papers Of Thomas Jefferson, Ed. By T.J. Randolph
Pizza tastes better than broccoli and opinion tastes better than news.
— Clay Johnson
It is never to late to practice proper Netiquette. Start today. Be nice! NetworkEtiquette.net
— David Chiles
People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over...We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical, ill-considered criticism. It's worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy. A year later there is a new political ring or a change in the paper's ownership, consequence: more confusion, more contradiction, a sudden inrush of new ideas, their tempering, their distillation, the reaction against them-
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
U.S. News Organizations observe the anniversary of September 11 with investigations about the nation’s continuing vulnerability to terrorism. First, the New York Daily News reports that two of its reporters carried box cutters, razor knives, and pepper spray on fourteen commercial flights without getting caught. Then ABC News reports that it smuggled fifteen pounds of uranium into New York City. Then Fox News reports that it flew Osama bin Laden to Washington, D.C., and videotaped him touring the White House.
— Dave Barry
All the media of modern consciousness—from the printing press to radio and the movies—were used just as readily by authoritarian reactionaries, and then by modern totalitarians, to reduce liberty and enforce conformity as they ever were by libertarians to expand it.
— Adam Gopnik
When you turn on the news, it's the same old rich white people that have systematically ruined this country regurgitating the same tired, stale ideas. And they keep getting invited back.
— Allison Kilkenny Jamie Kilstein
The media's job is to serve as society's referee, throwing down truth flags when uninformed bigots are shouting their opinions into the wind.
— Allison Kilkenny Jamie Kilstein
Personalized filters play to the most compulsive parts of you, creating "compulsive media" to get you to click things more.
— Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You
Propositions are true or false. Images are not.
— Gene Edward Veith Jr.
Those who make objectivity a religion are liars. they are scared of human pain. They dont want to be objective, it's a lie: they want to be objects, so as not to suffer.
— Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces
If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.
— Thomas Sowell
Up till now it has been thought that the growth of the Christian myths during the Roman Empire was possible only because printing was not yet invented. Precisely the contrary. The daily press and the telegraph, which in a moment spreads inventions over the whole earth, fabricate more myths (and the bourgeois cattle believe and enlarge upon them) in one day than could have formerly been done in a century.
— Karl Marx, Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 2003. Die Deutsche Ideologie: Artikel, Druckvorlagen, Entwurfe, Reinschriftenfragmente Und Notizen Zu "I. Feuerbach" Und "Ii. Sankt Bruno"
It is not brains or intelligence that is needed to cope with the problems with Plato and Aristotle and all of their successors to the present have failed to confront. What is needed is a readiness to undervalue the world altogether. This is only possible for a Christian... All technologies and all cultures, ancient and modern, are part of our immediate expanse. There is hope in this diversity since it creates vast new possibilities of detachment and amusement at human gullibility and self-deception. There is no harm in reminding ourselves from time to time that the "Prince of this World" is a great P.R. man, a great salesman of new hardware and software, a great electric engineer, and a great master of the media. It is his master stroke to be not only environmental but invisible for the environmental is invincibly persuasive when ignored.
— Marshall McLuhan, The Medium and the Light
You could have done something with newspapers. We didn't do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newspapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about cases of indecent assault, and no Government was wise enough to stop us having them that way. But something might have been done with newspapers, if we'd been wise enough.
— Nevil Shute, On the Beach
It's good netiquette to avoid information that offends or challenge errors when confronted. NetworkEtiquette.net
— David Chiles
Old media companies will be further challenged in the next 15 years, as a new wave of user-generated content washes over the Internet, thanks to the increasing availability and affordability of portable, digital-based electronic devices. The cameraphones which seemed like such novelties just a few years ago will be in everyone's purse and pocket a few years from now.
— Ian Lamont
Get used to the idea of significant portion of the population walking around with high-speed Internet connections on their person, with sophisticated video cameras built in. They will be shooting all kinds of events all the time. Crime. Crashes. Speeches. Sports. And the footage won't be the short, sanitized and safe versions we usually see on television, courtesy of the old media gatekeepers. The user-generated pictures and video will be raw and real. It will be disturbing, yet illuminating. And it will be shared over the 'Net almost as it happens, and available for everyone to see.
— Ian Lamont
Manuscript editions didn't immediately die out with the printing explosion that burst across Europe in the 1460s and 1470s. Manuscripts continued to be produced into the 16th century, many decades after presses had spread to most minor cities in Western Europe.
— Ian Lamont
Robbed of a rapt audience, advertisers know that influencing how you spend what to do while depends on having some control over how you spend the resources in your head.
— Gregory C. Carlson, Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says about You
Newspapers provided a common culture of aspiration.
— Charles Emmerson, 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War
In my book, the media are a necessary evil: they live off the animal inside us, they bait the front pages with second-hand blood for the hyenas to snuffle up, but they come in useful enough that you want to stay on their good side.
— Tana French, Broken Harbour
There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake.
— Theodore Roosevelt
But aliens? There are TV shows about them. There are books and movies and more. The media indoctrinates you to them until people are so desensitized they don't flinch at seeing aliens on TV or having their children buy plastic versions for a quarter.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Artificial Gods
A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren't they?
— Gore Vidal
Dear Hunger Games :Screw you for helping cowards pretend you have to be great with a bow to fight evil.You don't need to be drafted into a monkey-infested jungle to fight evil.You don't need your father's light sabre, or to be bitten by a radioactive spider.You don't need to be stalked by a creepy ancient vampire who is basically a pedophile if you're younger than a redwood.Screw you mainstream media for making it look like moral courage requires hair gel, thousands of sit ups and millions of dollars of fake ass CGI.Moral courage is the gritty, scary and mostly anonymous process of challenging friends, co-workers and family on issues like spanking, taxation, debt, circumcision and war.Moral courage is standing up to bullies when the audience is not cheering, but jeering. It is helping broken people out of abusive relationships, and promoting the inner peace of self knowledge in a shallow and empty pseudo-culture.Moral courage does not ask for - or receive - permission or the praise of the masses. If the masses praise you, it is because you are helping distract them from their own moral cowardice and conformity. Those who provoke discomfort create change - no one else.So forget your politics and vampires and magic wands and photon torpedoes. Forget passively waiting for the world to provoke and corner you into being virtuous. It never will.Stop watching fictional courage and go live some; it is harder and better than anything you will ever see on a screen.Let's make the world change the classification of courage from 'fantasy' to 'documentary.'You know there are people in your life who are doing wrong. Go talk to them, and encourage them to pursue philosophy, self-knowledge and virtue.Be your own hero; you are the One that your world has been waiting for.
— Stefan Molyneux
Manipulating the media is akin to poisoning a nation’s water supply – it affects all of our lives in unimaginable ways.
— Lance Morcan, The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy
It’s becoming obvious to most that mainstream media is nothing but a megaphone for the global elite to present biased news that’s designed to align the masses with their agenda.
— James Morcan, The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy
Unfortunately, mainstream news has become infotainment, sharing more in common with the entertainment industry than with traditional journalism. Gossip, characterizations and injections of drama are subtly infused with facts, altering the truth in a similar way to how dramatists twist true stories to create greater excitement.
— Lance Morcan, The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy
The media, like anything else, can be bought. Everything, it seems, has its price. Even the free press.
— Lance Morcan, The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy
Traditional journalism, where reporters deliver information in a balanced and unbiased fashion, is rapidly fading into obscurity. This is especially evident on television where high profile reporters become bigger than the story, delivering news with large dollops of personality and wit – almost as if they are actors.
— Lance Morcan, The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy
Whole columns are devoted to parliamentary debates and to political intrigues; while the vast everyday life of a nation appears only in the columns given to economic subjects, or in the pages devoted to reports of police and law cases. And when you read the newspapers, your hardly think of the incalculable number of beings—all humanity, so to say—who grow up and die, who know sorrow, who work and consume, think and create outside the few encumbering personages who have been so magnified that humanity is hidden by their shadows, enlarged by our ignorance.
— Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread
The job of art is not to store moments of experience but to explore environments that are otherwise invisible. Art is not a retrieval system of precious moments of past cultures. Art has a live, ongoing function. McLuhan CD-ROM
— Marshall McLuhan
The constant broadcast and reception of ghostly images via radio and television, according to this notion, had weakened the sense, particularly among youth, of possessing physical the sense, particularly among youth, of possessing physical bodies and private identities. McLuhan CD-ROM
— Marshall McLuhan
By the way, goals and objectives are meaningless at the speed of light. At the speed of light, you aren’t going somewhere, you’re already there. On the telephone you’re not going somewhere, you’re there. And in the electronic world, going somewhere, you’re there. And in the electronic world, there are no goals or objectives, we’re already there. McLuhan CD-ROM
— Marshall McLuhan
The Media and the internet have taken up the responsibility of molding the young ones amongst us, leaving us to pursuethe careers we treasure.
— Oche Otorkpa, The Unseen Terrorist
Subjective storytelling is now almost as common in the news media as it is in feature films, TV dramas, novels or theater shows. Journalists at their worst are self-centered storytellers who either knowingly or unknowingly bend truths into stories that match their personal beliefs or those of their employers.
— Lance Morcan, The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy
In her book claiming that allegations of ritualistic abuse are mostly confabulations, La Fontaine’s (1998) comparison of social workers to ‘nazis’ shows the depth of feeling evident amongst many sceptics. However, this raises an important question: Why did academics and journalists feel so strongly about allegations of ritualistic abuse, to the point of pervasively misrepresenting the available evidence and treating women disclosing ritualistic abuse, and those workers who support them, with barely concealed contempt? It is of course true that there are fringe practitioners in the field of organised abuse, just as there are fringe practitioners in many other health-related fields. However, the contrast between the measured tone of the majority of therapists and social workers writing on ritualistic abuse, and the over-blown sensationalism of their critics, could not be starker. Indeed, Scott (2001) notes with irony that the writings of those who claimed that ‘satanic ritual abuse’ is a ‘moral panic’ had many of the features of a moral panic: scapegoating therapists, social workers and sexual abuse victims whilst warning of an impending social catastrophe brought on by an epidemic of false allegations of sexual abuse. It is perhaps unsurprising that social movements for people accused of sexual abuse would engage in such hyperbole, but why did this rhetoric find so many champions in academia and the media?
— Michael Salter, Organised Sexual Abuse
The witch-hunt narrative is now the conventional wisdom about these cases. That view is so widely endorsed and firmly entrenched that so widely endorsed and firmly entrenched that there would seem to be nothing left to say about these cases. But a close examination of the witch hunt canon leads to some unsettling questions: Why is there so little in the way of academic scholarship about these cases? Almost all of the major witch-hunt writings have been in magazines, often without any footnotes to verify or assess the claims made. Why hasn't anyone writing about these cases said anything about how difficult they are to research? There are so many roadblocks and limitations to researching these cases that it would seem incumbent on any serious writer to address the limitations of data sources. Many of these cases seem to have been researched in a manner of days or weeks. Nevertheless, the cases are described in a definitive way that belies their length and complexity, along with the inherent difficulty in researching original trial court documents. This book is based on the first systematic examination of court records in these cases.
— Ross Cheit, The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children
They were going to the house of a man who was shot dead. What was with all the exuberance? But maybe that was the only way you could move forward after mindlessly recording stories of brutality and violence for days on end? Maybe detachment was the only way. But if you could not be passionate about your job, what was the point in doing it?
— Shweta Ganesh Kumar, Between The Headlines
The walls, where there was room, were well decorated with calendars and posters showing bright, improbable girls with pumped-up breasts and no hips - blondes, brunettes and redheads, but always with this bust development, so that a visitor of another species might judge from the preoccupation of artist and audience that the seat of procreation lay in the mammaries. Alice Chicoy...who worked among the shining girls, was wide-hipped and sag-chested and she walked well back on her heels...She was not in the least jealous of the calendar girls and the Coca-Cola girls. She had never seen anyone like them, and she didn't think anyone ever had.
— John Steinbeck, The Wayward Bus
She still loved the profession and enjoyed the lives and piece to cameras, but she knew it was all a tad too farcical at times. There were far too many stories they reported and forgot. Far too many conflicts that were once headlines and had captured the imaginations of many now awaited resolution, stale and unwanted as yesterday’s tea. It was hard to keep up your spirit when you started realizing it was just a job after all and that a headline did not change someone’s destiny. Except maybe the reporter’s if she or he was picked up by a rival channel for better pay. So getting into the profession wanting to make a difference and working for the greater good as the journalists of yore had done was certainly not an option anymore.
— Shweta Ganesh Kumar, Between The Headlines
But Sir, he works with NT? Why would he tell us where to go? Aren’t we the competition?’ Satya asked. Nagesh shook his head gravely. ‘Actually the competition starts at the headquarters and is between the people who come on TV, and want to make sure their face is noticed by the rival channel, so that they get picked up for a higher salary. Between us camerapersons, there is no rivalry. We don’t do piece to cameras, we don’t come on TV. We do all the jostling to get you the best visuals to show on the channel. We just want to get the news to the viewers, no matter which logo is pasted on it.
— Shweta Ganesh Kumar, Between The Headlines
...when the public nerve is aroused, the most impressive capacity of man is his skill for lying.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna
Gain fame, and the paparazzi or media waits and watches for them to slip, just to shame their name.
— Anthony Liccione
A journalist's job is to collect information," Ovid said to Pete. "Nope," Pete said. "That's what we do. It's not what they do." Dellarobia was unready to be pushed out of the conversation just like that. "Then what do you think the news people drive their Jeeps all the way out here for?" "To shore up the prevailing view of their audience and sponsors." "Pete takes a dim view of his fellow humans," Ovid said. "He prefers insects. Dellarobia turned her chair halfway around to face Pete, scraping noisily against the cement floor. "You're saying people only tune in to news they know they're going to agree with?" "Bingo," said Pete.
— Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior
When there is no news, we will give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.
— David Brinkley
When you are the only laowai in a village of 10,000 Chinese martial artists and you've sat through several dozen films where a white man shouts, "You Chinese dog," before getting his ass kicked, it starts to irritate you. We all need role models.
— Matthew Polly, American Shaolin: Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China
Still others worry that news organizations may pull their punches when reporting about the activities of their corporate parents or partners. Will ABC News go easy on problems at Disney, for example, which owns ABC?
— Edward S. Greenberg, The Struggle for Democracy
The owners and top managers of most news media organizations tend to be conservative and Republican. This is hardly surprising. The shareholders and executives of multi-billion-dollar corporations are not very interested in undermining the free enterprise system, for example, income from offended advertisers. These owners and managers ultimately decide which reporters, newscasters, and editors to hire or fire, promote or discourage. Journalists who want to get a head, therefore, may have to come to terms with the policies of the people who own and run media businesses.
— Edward S. Greenberg, The Struggle for Democracy
...what a leveller this remote-control gizmo was...it chopped down the heavyweight and stretched out the slight until all the set's emissions, commercials, murders, game-shows, the thousand and one varying joys and terrors of the real and the imagined, acquired an equal weight...
— Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
The mass communications that could enable our politics for good have instead turned it into a bland conglomeration of stinted opinion cloaked in the occasional media frenzy of blame or denial.
— Sara Sheridan
On the day Princess Diana died, a group of students had gathered before a lecture, talking about what they had heard on the radio that morning, repeating “paparazzi” over and over, all sounding knowing and cocksure, until, in a lull, Okoli Okafor quietly asked, “But who exactly are the paparazzi? Are they motorcyclists?” and instantly earned himself the nickname Okoli Paparazzi
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
A loose definition of the Tea Party might be fifteen million pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the small handful of banks and investment companies who advertise on Fox and CNBC.
— Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
If “piracy means using the creative property of others without their permission- if “if value, then right” is true- then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy. Every important sector of “big media” today- film, records, radio, and cable TV-was born of a kind of piracy so defined. The consistent story is how last generation’s pirates join this generation’s country club-until now.
— Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity
The mainstream media act just like in the classic studies of herd animals; at the exact instant more than half of the herd makes a move to bolt, they all move.
— Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
Probably no country was ever ruled by so mean a class of tyrants as, with a few noble exceptions, are the editors of the periodical press in this country. And as they live and rule only by their servility, and appealing to the worst, and not the better nature of man, the people who read them are in the condition of the dog that returns to his vomit.
— Henry David Thoreau, Slavery in Massachusetts
The people who were behind my abuse were very clever. They had created something which would be so difficult to explain, so difficult to make sense of, that it would be easier to dismiss it all out of hand as the ramblings of an over-imaginative child.Many people don't want to believe that child abuse exists, or are only willing to believe that certain kinds of abuse go on. They don't want to consider that something so horrific, and yet so widespread, is taking place in their community, perhaps only a door away from them, a few steps from their lives - or even in their lives if they would only open their eyes.I know this, not just because of my own personal experience, but through my work supporting and listening to survivors and those still experiencing abuse.To ask people not only to believe in the abuse but also to take on board all the details of what I'm revealing is a big step, and it has taken me many years to make the decision to tell my story, but it has to be done. This type of abuse is ongoing, as is the culture of disbelief to make people dismiss anyone who talks about it. This needs to be challenged. The things I'm telling you in this book have been kept close to me all my life; I have always known that talking of them, telling my full story, would make some people incredulous - but it's true. It's all true.Whatever the set dressing, they were rapists and abusers - just plain and simple/ The trappings that surrounded the abuse was just a way of creating something that would allow them to do what they wanted to, but which would also allow for confusion on our parts, and devotion on the parts of the 'followers'. I think this is what many people find so hard when they are asked to believe in this sort of abuse. It all seems so fantastical, so it's easy to dismiss. I'm not asking you to believe in any of that. I'm not asking you to believe in Satan, I'm not even asking you to believe in God. I'm just asking you to accept that there are some people who will go to extraordinary lengths to cover up the facts that they are abusing children.
— Laurie Matthew, Groomed: An Uncle Who Went Too Far, a Mother Who Didn't Care, a Little Girl Who Waited for Justice
Modern architecture only becomes modern with its engagement with the media.
— Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media
Selling the presidency like cereal! How can you talk seriously about issues with half-minute spots?
— Adlai Ewing Stevenson
You're right that not everything we do has to have some kind of social agenda, but that doesn't mean it can only be anesthetizing crap.
— Brian K. Vaughan, Y: The Last Man, Vol. 9: Motherland
A paparazzi is merely an extremely nosy nobody with a camera—and bills to pay.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Confessions of a Misfit
The media made the masses to find not-so-skinny women appear not-so-beautiful … in the eyes of the remote holder.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Confessions of a Misfit
I believe that, in this country, the press exerts a greater and a more pernicious influence than the church did in its worst period. We are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians.
— Henry David Thoreau, Slavery in Massachusetts
She realized that the photograph had caused his reaction. It came to her almost as a revelation. Think of it: a photographer presses a button. A few hours later and half a world away, some dots of ink on a news print showed what he had seen-and had the power to touch peoples emotions, perhaps to change their way of thinking.
— Soheir Khashoggi, Nadia's Song
The BFMSS [British False Memory Syndrome Society]The founder of the 'false memory' movement in Britain is an accused father. Two of his adult daughters say that Roger Scotford sexually abused them in childhood. He denied this and responded by launching a spectacular counter-attack, which enjoyed apparently unlimited and uncritical air time in the mass media and provoke Establishment institutions that had made no public utterance about abuse to pronounce on the accused adults' repudiation of it.p171-172The 'British False Memory Syndrome Society' lent a scientific aura to the allegations - the alchemy of 'falsehood' and 'memory' stirred with disease and science. The new name pathologised the accusers and drew attention away from the accused. But the so-called syndrome attacked not only the source of the stories but also the alliances between the survivors' movement and practitioners in the health, welfare, and the criminal justice system. The allies were represented no longer as credulous dupes but as malevolent agents who imported a miasma of the 'false memories' into the imaginations of distressed victims.Roger Scotford was a former naval officer turned successful property developer living in a Georgian house overlooking an uninterrupted valley in luscious middle England. He was a rich man and was able to give up everything to devote himself to the crusade.He says his family life was normal and that he had been a 'Dr Spock father'. But his first wife disagrees and his second wife, although believing him innocent, describes his children's childhood as very difficult. His daughters say they had a significantly unhappy childhood.In the autumn of 1991, his middle daughter invited him to her home to confront him with the story of her childhood. She was supported by a friend and he was invited to listen and then leave. She told him that he had abused her throughout her youth. Scotford, however, said that the daughter went to a homeopath for treatment for thrush/candida and then blamed the condition on him. He also said his daughter, who was in her twenties, had been upset during a recent trip to France to buy a property. He said he booked them into a hotel where they would share a room. This was not odd, he insisted, 'to me it was quite natural'. He told journalists and scholars the same story, in the same way, reciting the details of her allegations, drawing attention to her body and the details of what she said he had done to her. Some seemed to find the detail persuasive. Several found it spooky.p172-173
— Beatrix Campbell, Stolen Voices: The People And Politics Behind The Campaign To Discredit Childhood Testimony
Lebanon is the only country where media kills more than bombs, injures more than guns...and at last they say freedom of speech...
— Hussein S. Hariri
Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.
— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Yet, the main issue is not the shaping of the minds by explicit messages in the media, but the absence of a given content in the media.
— Manuel Castells, Communication Power
There hasn't been a scandal this big at the C.I.A. since (CLASSIFIED) committed (CENSORED) to (REDACTED).
— Stephen Colbert
As always, imagine how great the press corps would be if it devoted 1/1000th the energy to dissecting non-sex political wrongdoing
— Glenn Greenwald
He was looking for programs on which he might be allowed to appear. But it was too early in the evening for programs that allowed people with peculiar opinions to speak out. It was only a little after eight o'clock, so all the shows were about silliness or murder.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
The mythology warped and twisted back along itself until Buffy Summers, the girl who once railed against the unfairness of being Chosen, looked at a squadron of girls who were just like she'd been and took away their right to Choose.
— Seanan McGuire, Whedonistas!: A Celebration of the Worlds of Joss Whedon by the Women Who Love Them
Objectivity, in this sense, means that a person's statements about the world can be trusted if they are submitted to established rules deemed legitimate by a professional community. Facts here are not aspects of the world, but consensually validated statements about it.
— Michael Schudson, Discovering The News: A Social History Of American Newspapers
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