Media quotations

Page 3

◆ If everything is amplified, we hear nothing.

- Jon Stewart99

◆ People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.

- Jess C. Scott99

◆ 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 Hitchcock99

◆ The Ultimate Rule ought to be: 'If it sounds GOOD to you, it's bitchin'; if it sounds BAD to YOU, it's shitty. The more your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don't like. American radio listeners, raised on a diet of _____ (fill in the blank), have experienced a musical universe so small they cannot begin to know what they like.

- Frank Zappa99

◆ All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.

- George Orwell99

◆ The American people are free to do exactly what they are told.

- Ward Churchill99

◆ 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 Franken99

◆ 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. Murrow99

◆ Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it.

- Lysander Spooner99

◆ How would your life be different if...You were conscious about the food you ate, the people you surround yourself with, and the media you watch, listen to, or read? Let today be the day...You pay attention to what you feed your mind, your body, and your life. Create a nourishing environment conducive to your growth and well-being today.

- Steve Maraboli99

◆ 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 Postman99

◆ The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters—there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void.... That's why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.

- Jean Baudrillard99

◆ The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.

- Ray Bradbury99

◆ Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.

- Edward R. Murrow99

◆ If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own.

- Wes "Scoop" Nisker99