Control The Media Quotes & Sayings

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. — Noam Chomsky

When people see opportunity, when they have a sense of control of their own destiny, then they're less vulnerable to the propaganda and twisted ideologies that have been attracting young people - particularly being turbocharged through social media. — Barack Obama

Who should regulate the media? Who should control the press? The commentariat agonises, as if the choice was between state control through some autocratic press law or a new Press Complaints Commission redecorated with false teeth. But there is another way. Let journalists regulate themselves ... Let's have a little democracy in the media. Even in the Murdoch papers, the number of journalists who are irretrievably lawless and callous is quite small. Most of the disasters at the News of the World happened because its editors treated their staff in the style of Muammar Gaddafi. — Neal Ascherson

The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority. It is a country so powerful, so big, so pleasing to so many of its citizens that it can afford to give freedom of dissent to the small number who are not pleased. There is no system of control with more openings, apertures, leeways, flexibilities, rewards for the chosen, winning tickets in lotteries. There is none that disperses its controls more complexly through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass media
none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty. — Howard Zinn

In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry. The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity - and it was an atrocity. — Oliver Stone

As we move toward the millennium, the year 2000, the most powerful nations are not those that have nuclear bombs, but those that control the media. That's where the battle is being fought; that is how you control people's minds. — Spike Lee

The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses. — Malcolm X

Trends working at least marginally towards the implantation of a very narrow range of attitudes, memories and opinions include control of major television networks and newspapers by a small number of similarly motivated powerful corporations and individuals, the disappearance of competitive daily newspapers in many cities, the replacement of substantive debate by sleaze in political campaigns, and episodic erosion of the principle of the separation of powers. It is estimated (by the American media expert Ben Bagditrian) that fewer than two dozen corporations control more than half of the global business in daily newspapers, magazines, television, books and movies! — Carl Sagan

Because of the control of the media by corporate wealth, the discovery of truth depends on an alternative media, such as small radio stations, networks, programs. Also, alternative newspapers, which exist all over the country. Also, cable TV programs, which are not dependent on commercial advertising. Also, the internet, which can reach millions of people by-passing the conventional media. — Howard Zinn

Girlfriend and 100 Percent Fun were my two peeks, around '92 and '96. The reality is that the times I had the most media success, sold lots of records and played bigger shows, I had the least control of my own life. — Matthew Sweet

Neither science, nor the politics in power, nor the mass media, nor business, nor the law nor even the military are in a position to define or control risks rationally. — Ulrich Beck

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - 'indoctrination', we might say - exercised through the mass media. — Noam Chomsky

When we, through our educational culture, through the media, through the entertainment culture, give our children the impression that human beings cannot control their passions, we are telling them, in effect, that human beings cannot be trusted with freedom. — Alan Keyes

At least in the West, politicians, corporations and media moguls can no longer take for granted their power to control the public discourse - and have it go unchallenged. — David Puttnam

To overcome our biological limitations as individuals, we have co-evolved collective systems and capacities - cultural, social, economic, political, scientific, media, educational, public relations, etc. But the flaw in all that is that we have designed them primarily for comfort, profit, power, control, and entertainment rather than for collective intelligence, sanity, and wisdom. — Tom Atlee

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

For so long, companies were run using a command-and-control, 'top down' hierarchical method that involved dictating down the command chain and maintaining order. What I've witnessed in our time is evolving democratization, a shift to a demand economy accelerated by technological advancements like social media. — Kevin Allen

Overnight the digital age had changed the course of history for our company. Everything that we thought was in our control no longer was. But within a year we had invested in social media and digital experts. Now Starbucks is the number one brand on Facebook. — Howard Schultz

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. — Greg Carlson

The myth of the liberal media empowers conservatives to control debate in the United States to the point where liberals cannot even hope for a fair shake anymore. — Eric Alterman

If it's true that nothing is more potent than an idea, then those who control the media can direct minds en masse. — Lance Morcan

No matter how much control kids get over the media they watch, they are still utterly powerless when it comes to the manufacturing of brands. Even a consumer revolt merely reinforces one's role as a consumer, not an autonomous or creative being. — Douglas Rushkoff

Multinational corporations do control. They control the politicians. They control the media. They control the pattern of consumption, entertainment, thinking. They're destroying the planet and laying the foundation for violent outbursts and racial division. — Jerry Brown

They had not, under the heavens and on earth, one single weapon. They don't control the land they live on, the schools which train them, the heat and food their bodies need to live through the winter's cold, the media which gives them language, the military weapons for which they give most of their money. There is no more time in this city. Reasonable people don't let themselves dream because no dream can be true. They have a cry that bought them back to first causes: But we who have no mothers, no fathers, no homes or love. Where are we going to run? — Kathy Acker

The decentralized nature of online conversations often makes it easier to manipulate public opinion, both domestically and globally. Regimes that once relied on centralized systems of media control can now deliver ideological messages more subtly, with the help of little-known intermediaries like anonymous commenters on websites. — Evgeny Morozov

The one thing that is absolutely essential is that there shouldn't be any governmental control [of the media] directly or indirectly. — Tony Benn

To borrow from Budd Schulberg's description of a media manipulator in his classic novel The Harder They Fall, I was "indulging myself in the illusions that we can deal in filth without becoming the thing we touch." I no longer have those illusions. Winston Churchill wrote of the appeasers of his age that "each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last." I was even more delusional. I thought I could skip being devoured entirely. It would never turn on me. I was in control. I was the expert. But I was wrong. — Ryan Holiday

The same six corporations own the media outlets that we rely on for nearly all of our information. These corporations serve the interest of the central banks. The strength of these corporations lies in the large amounts of money that they generate. If the people were informed of the control these corporations have, then they would stop investing their money towards these companies, and the corporations would lose their power and wealth. It is in the best interest of the government, the corporations and the banks to keep the public uninformed. The biggest tool of maintaining public ignorance is by the control of media outlets that distribute information to the mass population. — Joseph P. Kauffman

The rhythm is below me, the rhythm of the heat. The rhythm is around me, the rhythm has control. The rhythm is inside me, the rhythm has my soul. — Peter Gabriel

Media companies, under the guise of piracy, are asking congress to give them more control over fair use. Hollywood wants to control innovation. — Joe Kraus

It obviously matters who gets to be president. And it's perfectly valid for us media types to advocate for the candidate we think is more qualified, based on our reporting. But the hype has gotten so out of control, it's become bigger than the presidency itself. — Matt Taibbi

I think it's actually harder to watch the meet from the media section. You have no control there. — Dominique Dawes

If you accept the existence of advertising, you accept a system designed to persuade and to dominate minds by interfering in people's thinking patterns. You also accept that the system will be used by the sorts of people who like to influence people and are good at it. No person who did not wish to dominate others would choose to use advertising, or choosing it, succeed in it. So the basic nature of advertising and all technologies created to serve it will be consistent with this purpose, will encourage this behaviour in society, and will tend to push social evolution in this direction. — Jerry Mander

Governments can no longer control 100 percent of the story. Time and geographical boundaries disappear. In places like China and all over the Middle East, social-media outlets are being used to expose and hold accountable public officials that don't want to be held accountable for corruption and human rights abuses. — Amy Jo Martin

Another threat, less overt but no less basic, confronts liberal democracy. More directly linked to the impact of technology, it involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled and directed society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific knowhow. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. Under such circumstances, the scientific and technological momentum of the country would not be reversed but would actually feed on the situation it exploits.
... Persisting social crisis, the emergence of a charismatic personality, and the exploitation of mass media to obtain public confidence would be the steppingstones in the piecemeal transformation of the United States into a highly controlled society. — Zbigniew Brzezinski

When you control opinion, as corporate America controls opinion in the United States by owning the media, you can make the masses believe almost anything you want, and guide them as you please. — Gore Vidal

in order to maintain the cultural status quo of political and social hierarchical control, this same society perpetuates chronic fear through various modes of manipulation, such as mass media propaganda force-feeding its participants a reality of rampant consumerism, economic scarcity, and self-repression. In participating with this societal norm, we perpetuate a language that encourages chronic fear and the evasion of emotional responsibility, a language deficient in genuine self-confidence, mutual respect, compassion, or courage. This dynamic confluence of manipulating forces keeps us unconscious to the dramatic presence of chronic fear and our full emotional potency. — James W. Jesso

Intervention for the prevention and control of osteoporosis should comprise a combination of legislative action, educational measures, health service activities, media coverage, and individual counselling to initiate changes in behaviour. — Gro Harlem Brundtland

Whatever was written in the media was beyond me. The only thing I could control was getting fit. — Andrew Flintoff

Although we've been authoritatively informed that a majority of Americans support a "pathway to citizenship," approximately five hundred times in the last two years alone, according to a quick Nexis search,18 that is a lie. This is part of the media's campaign to convince Americans they're nuts for preferring not to turn America into Mexico. Polls are irrelevant if you lie to the people being polled. Poll: Do you support commonsense gun safety or are you against it? Headline: MAJORITY OF AMERICANS SUPPORT GUN CONTROL. But I hate gun control! Too late! You agreed to "commonsense gun safety" - that means gun control. — Ann Coulter

Now, 'the fiscal cliff' is a name that the media came up with, but some of us have been saying for years, 'You have got to stop the out of control federal spending, or you will end up at this point.' We're there. — Marsha Blackburn

But the truth is that the world has changed. And not participating in the conversation is a loud statement of its own to your customer base. You can't control your branding message in any case because your customers are already talking about you online. The best you can do is to participate. — Vanessa Fox

Moments of crisis, like the shooting in Newtown, tend to produce brief spikes of popular interest in gun control. My research on media attention suggests these spikes are extremely short-lived, and that they may be decreasing in intensity. — Ethan Zuckerman

Why didn't the Democrats accomplish more right after the 2006 elections that gave them control of Congress? It wasn't just that they didn't have votes to override a presidential veto or block a filibuster. They didn't use their mandate to substantially change how the public--and the media-- thought about issues. They just tried to be rational, to devise programs to fit people's interests and the polls. Because there was little understanding of the brain, there was no campaign to change brains. Indeed, the very idea of "changing brains" sounds a little sinister to progressives-- a kind of Frankenstein image comes to mind. It sounds Machiavellian to liberals, like what the Republicans do. But "changing minds" in any deep way always requires changing brains. Once you understand a bit more about how brains work, you will understand that politics is very much about changing brains-- and that it can be highly moral and not the least bit sinister or underhanded. — George Lakoff

The media companies control whether a candidate gets "coverage" - which itself is tied to the knowledge of how much he or she has raised. The networks then know how much money the candidate is likely to spend on commercial airtime buys - so, this is a reinforcing system of legal corruption and quid pro quo news coverage. — Robert Kane Pappas

Whoever controls the media, controls the mind — Jim Morrison

I have no problem selling books to media franchises and we do it all the time. The author must understand that he/she is a writer for hire and has no control over copyright or over editorial changes made to the text. — Richard Curtis

Everyone can have health care. Everyone can earn a living wage. We can educate all our kids - well.But none of that happens unless there's a political revolution. And it's not going to happen unless we deal with corporate control of the media. — Bernie Sanders

The COUNTRY is controlled by LAWS
LAWS are controlled by POLITICIANS
POLITICIANS are controlled by VOTERS
VOTERS are controlled by PUBLIC OPINION
PUBLIC OPINION is controlled by the MEDIA (News, Hollywood, Internet...) & EDUCATION

so. whoever controls MEDIA & EDUCATION, controls the COUNTRY. — William J. Federer

Everyone knows that Jews control the media and banks and stuff. But did you know that when you go to a carnival and you have to be a certain height to go on a ride, Jews control that height? It has nothing to do with safety. It's just us flexing our Semitic muscles. — Eugene Mirman

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

There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press — Mark Twain

To become informed and hold government accountable, the general public needs to obtain news that is comprehensive yet interesting and understandable, that conveys facts and outcomes, not cosmetic images and airy promises. But that is not what the public demands. — Eric Alterman

When we embraced social media, we took more control of the Newark narrative. We increased responsiveness toward residents. We drew more of our constituents in to participate in government and improve our cities. — Cory Booker

Future historians will surely see us as having created in the media a Frankenstein monster whom no one knows how to control ordirect, and marvelthat weshould have so meekly subjected ourselves to its destructive and often malign influence. — Malcolm Muggeridge

It's a big culture of mind control too, MK-Ultra mind control rules in Hollywood. If you don't know that, google it and look into it. It's really hard for artists to find their voice in the media. It's levels of brainwashing and mind control. — Roseanne Barr

Eople would like to think there's somebody up there who knows what he's doing. Since we don't participate, we don't control and we don't even think about the questions of crucial importance, we hope somebody is paying attention who has some competence. Let's hope the ship has a captain, in other words, since we're not taking in deciding what's going on. I think that's a factor. But also, it is an important feature of the ideological system to impose on people the feeling that they are incompetent to deal with these complex and important issues; they'd better leave it to the captain. One device is to develop a star system, an array of figures who are often media creations or creations of the academic propaganda establishment, whose deep insights we are supposed to admire and to whom we must happily and confidently assign the right to control our lives and control international affairs. — Noam Chomsky

...best intentions notwithstanding, no one can control how the media communicates a story and what the public eventually understands. — Alexandra Zapruder

The COUNTRY is controlled by LAWS>
LAWS are controlled by POLITICIANS>
POLITICIANS are controlled by VOTERS>
VOTERS are controlled by PUBLIC OPINION>
PUBLIC OPINION is controlled by the MEDIA (News, Hollywood, Internet ... ) & EDUCATION
so. whoever controls MEDIA & EDUCATION, controls the COUNTRY. — William J. Federer

Your cameras can't control the minds of those who know, that you'll even sell your soul just to get a story sold. — Michael Jackson

while "freedom" from magic is certainly invoked as a constitutive element of modern modes of subjectivity, this freedom is purchased only at the price of potent new forms of social control and regimentation."

-- Making Magic, p. 13 — Randall Styers

Presidential primary debates are an important part of our political process. But the media has wrested complete control from the parties and candidates over everything, including the number, the format, the qualifications, and the moderators. And they've become a circus. — Mark McKinnon

There are many benefits to a sports entity breaking news directly to their recipients: the entity has full control over the message and how it is shared versus previously relying on a media outlets to translate or distribute as they choose. Also, there's no quicker place for valuable information to spread than Twitter. — Amy Jo Martin

Whenever there's a tragedy involving gun use, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, the gun-control lobby and the news media seize it as another opportunity to exploit the emotions of uninformed American people for political gain. — Walter E. Williams

But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control. — Robert Waterman McChesney

What is power, after all? Every one of the power elite's overwhelming advantages - military forces, surveillance systems, crowd control technology, control over the media, and nearly all the money in the world - depends on having people obeying orders and executing an assigned role. This obedience is a matter of shared ideologies, institutional culture, and the legitimacy of the systems in which we play roles. Legitimacy is a matter of collective perception, and we have the power to change people's perceptions. — Charles Eisenstein

Advertising," he wrote, "now compares with such long-standing institutions as the school and the church in the magnitude of its social influence. It dominates the media, it has vast power in the shaping of popular standards and it is really one of the very limited groups of institutions which exercise social control. — David Halberstam

The American craving for illegal, mind-altering, addictive chemicals provides a steady flow of American capital through the Texas border into Mexico and South America. Basically, the drug traffic is uncontainable as long as its U.S. market exists, but newspapers and other media virtuously trumpet feel-good headlines about "record drug busts" and arrests while the drug trade continues unabated. — William Earl Maxwell

The press, or at least most of it, has lost the passion, the outrage, and the sense of mission that once drove reporters to defy authority and tell the truth. — Chris Hedges

Another myth we fed to the public through the media was that legalizing abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place i1legally would then be done legally. In fact, of course, abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1,500 percent since legalization. — Bernard Nathanson

When I look at Africa many questions come to mind, many times I have asked myself what would happen if Dr Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba were to rise up and see what is happening, many times I have asked myself what would happen if Nelson Madiba Mandela were to rise up and see what is happening, because what they will be confronted with is an Africa where the Democratic Republic of Congo is unsettled, there is a war going on there, but it's not on the front pages of our newspapers because we don't even control our newspapers and the media. — Patrick L.O. Lumumba

Kids today are sold so much, by corporations and media and commercials and advertising and music videos, that I do. A lot of times, they retain that stuff and wear it, and that's the concept of a hipster. It's about owning it and redefining it, on your own level. It's a way of retaining control and meaning, in a world where you're being told to think in a certain way. — Joseph M. Kahn

it is usually assumed that in a room with a slender therapist and a fat patient, it is the patient who has a weight problem. That therapist, benefitting from thin privilege may well assume that the way she eats, what she eats and how she exercises are what make her different from her patient, what make her thin and her patient fat. She may believe that because she carefully monitors what she eats and faithfully exercises, that she has control over her body, control that the fat woman could have if only she tried harder and did as she does. There is nothing in the media or even the professional literature to contradict her assumptions. — Cheryl Fuller

If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves. — Marshall McLuhan

One important theme of this book is that globalization and media are not abstract, unknowable, inevitable, inexorable forces of economics and technology. They are not out of the control of human hands. They have been and will be created by people. They are the result of human actions, or what academics call "human agency. — Jack Lule

Until you realize how easily it is for your mind to be manipulated, you remain the puppet of someone else's game. — Evita Ochel

He who controls the media controls the minds of the public. — Noam Chomsky

It is not true that Pena is 20 points above me. It's part of the management of the regime. They have control of the media, with few exceptions. — Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador

The media not only fans our fears, it comforts us in our hubris. Nearly every scare story comes with a Message: You can take control. You can do something to keep bad things from happening to your children and to keep life from throwing you curveballs. — Judith Warner

The media is too concentrated, too few people own too much. There's really five companies that control 90 percent of what we read, see and hear. It's not healthy. — Ted Turner

USA belongs to a handful of men who also control the media. Look at General Electric. It produces nuclear weapons for the Pentagon and also owns the NBC News cable channel, which is a very sophisticated censure apparatus, intrinsic to the system. It's genius. It's like an electronic cage around the nation which blocks information from getting through. — Gore Vidal

Since anti-racist individuals did not control mass media, the media became the primary tool that would be used and is still used to convince black viewers, and everyone else, of black inferiority. — Bell Hooks

The Western media tends to place a lot of emphasis on official institutions in Ukraine such as its supreme court, the central election commission, and the parliament. In reality, the people of Ukraine now control their destiny. — Bob Schaffer

Serial killers kill for the power and control they experience during the murders and for the added ego boost they get in the aftermath from community fears, media coverage, and the police investigations. — Pat Brown

Of course, the advantage is that, being in this business, you get to learn a lot, experience a lot of new things, and you can become real successful. The disadvantage is, of course the negative media. People may try to manipulate you and control you, and those are the things you have to avoid. But if you maintain strong family values and you believe in God, you can be successful. So, it's been tough, but I've gotten through it because I stuck with my family and my deep belief in God. — Aaliyah

Nationalist (forces around the world) could now more readily communicate and share their grievances, viewing themselves as similar groups, engaged in a common struggle for greater autonomy against control exerted from London or Paris. — Charles Emmerson

Once in a while a story is spectacular enough to break through and attract media attention, but the swell quickly subsides into the general glut of bad news over which we, as citizens, have so little control. — Ruth Ozeki

Religious ritual is a way of structuring time so that we, not employers, the market or the media, are in control. Life needs its pauses, its chapter breaks, if the soul is to have space to breathe. — Jonathan Sacks

If you think there is freedom of the press in the United States, I tell you there is no freedom of the press ... They come out with the cheap shot. The press should be ashamed of itself. They should come to both sides of the issue and hear both sides and let the American people make up their minds — Bill Moyers

for the last fifteen years we have been under the control of an entirely new complex, far more powerful and far more pervasive. I call it the politico-legal-media complex. The PLM. And — Michael Crichton

People in my industry [PR] would like people to believe we have ways to control social media. But that's one of the great swindles. — Eric Dezenhall

Those who rule have always had an interest in shaping the perceptions of those they wish to rule. But never in the history of humanity has their toolbox been so full. Advances in technology and psychology have enabled the messages of the rulers to permeate our consciousness to a degree no prior society could have imagined. — James Rozoff

And it is that one percent, the heads of large corporations, who control the policies of news media and determine what you and I hear on radio, read in the newspapers, see on television. It is more important for us to think about where the media gets its information. — Assata Shakur

I think there's been a major shift in grass roots media because of the Internet and because the geeks and nerds rule the world. They are in control in so many ways. — Erin Gray

Once you let the words go, you have no control over how they're printed or what the media does with them. So there's no point in trying to make plans or to control it. — Megan Fox

Political leaders, lacking documents that could be kept secret (apart from the occasional exception), lacking media they could control, were of necessity brought into a direct and immediate relationship with their constituents, and therefore under more and direct and immediate control. — Moses Finley

I am angry at the Jews for many things ... If you want to take the example of America, how they hold the power, the economical power in so many ways, and the press and the other kind of stuff ... I never realized how it happened and they came to control the media to that point. Why? — Oriana Fallaci

Case by case, we find that conformity is the easy way, and the path to privilege and prestige; dissidence carries personal costs that may be severe, even in a society that lacks such means of control as death
squads, psychiatric prisons, or extermination camps. The very structure of the media is designed to induce conformity to established doctrine. In a three-minute stretch between commercials, or in seven hundred words, it is impossible to present unfamiliar thoughts or surprising conclusions with the argument and evidence required to afford them some credibility. Regurgitation of welcome pieties faces no such problem. — Noam Chomsky

Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we're born? — Chuck Palahniuk

What the media is playing is what people want is really a false idea. Capitalism and people who control the market have a large hand in everything. It doesn't have anything to do with figuring out what the crowd wants to hear. It has to do with the media deciding what they think people want to hear. — Boots Riley