Media Control and Censorship

 

" ... so long as the media are in corporate hands, the task of social change will be vastly more difficult, if not impossible ..."

Robert McChesney, journalist and author

 

"As long as people are marginalized and distracted [they] have no way to organize or articulate their sentiments, or even know that others have these sentiments. People assume that they are the only people with a crazy idea in their heads. They never hear it from anywhere else. Nobody's supposed to think that. ... Since there's no way to get together with other people who share or reinforce that view and help you articulate it, you feel like an oddity, an oddball. So you just stay on the side and you don't pay any attention to what's going on. You look at something else, like the Superbowl."

Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic

 

Authors and Books excerpted on website - with links

"You have presented to stations around the world a model for freedom of speech and the unhindered availability of information... You have shown that despite media monopolies and manipulations it is possible to preserve a spirit of tolerance, freedom and truth and to allow dissenting voices to be heard... Your struggle to preserve your autonomy... has revealed an unexpected similarity between the media in the US and Serbia today, the freedom of speech is being stifled in a similar manner, journalists are being .. intimidated and progressive radio stations are prevented from operating. The character of media repression is virtually the same under openly totalitarian dictatorships as it is under democratic systems which are increasingly influenced by conservative structures."

A message of solidarity from banned independent radio station B92 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia to Radio KPFA in Berkeley and Radio WBAI in New York, expressing support in their struggle to preserve progressive community radio in the United States - July 1999

Media Control in the United States

" Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the [U.S.] media."

Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic

*****

" I have the greatest admiration for your propaganda. Propaganda in the West is carried out by experts who have had the best training in the world -- in the field of advertizing -- and have mastered the techniques with exceptional proficiency ... Yours are subtle and persuasive; ours are crude and obvious ... I think that the fundamental difference between our worlds, with respect to propaganda, is quite simple. You tend to believe yours ... and we tend to disbelieve ours. "

a Soviet correspondent based five years in the U.S.

Propaganda and Democracy

" 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, 1805 - 1859, French political thinker and author of Democracy in America

Media watch

"Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization."

George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwight and critic, 1856-1950

*****

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools and vassals of 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, Chief of Staff New York Times at New York Press Club, 1953

*****

"The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject."

Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor from 121-180 A.D. and Stoic philosopher

Project Censored - censored US Foreign Policy stories

" ... the media in the United States effectively represents the interests of corporate America, and ... the media elite are the watchdogs of what constitutes acceptable ideological messages, the parameters of news and information content, and the general use of media resources.

Peter Phillips, Project Censored, 1998

*****

" [The] media, our top elected official, and our two dominant political parties rarely criticize the growing power of large corporations because they are bankrolled by them."

Nancy Snow, author

*****

" The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

" Martin Luther King is the most notorious liar in the country."

J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI 1924-1972

Books page

"Basic civil liberties including the right to life, liberty and the freedom of personal and political expression, suffered a drastic setback in 1981. In more than a dozen regional nations, even the most fundamental rights -- life and the inviolability of the person -- were transgressed by the government-condoned practice of harassing, torturing and murdering political opponents of those in power ... These reverses can be linked to policies adopted by the Reagan administration ... [which] has allied the U.S. with the most violent regimes in the hemispere. He [Reagan] has sanctioned atrocities and human rights abuses by providing those governments with essentially unconditioned U.S. support."

Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 1982

*****

"We have never interfered in the internal government of a country and have no intention of doing so, never have had any thought of that kind."

Ronald Reagan, 1982

*****

" Good journalism is being criminalized or otherwise rendered perilous to its best practitioners. Attack a government agency like the CIA, or a Fortune 500 member ..., or the conduct of the military in Southeast Asia and you find yourself in deep trouble, naked and often alone. "

Daniel Schorr, journalist

*****

" The owners of the Washington Post long ago acknowledged that the Post is the government's voice to the people. In 1981, Katherine Graham, who owns the Post and Newsweek announced that her editors would "cooperate with the national security interests." National security in this context means "CIA.""

John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

*****

" Governments lie."

I.F. Stone, journalist and author

Magazines page - alternatives to the mainstream press

" The news and truth are not the same thing. "

Walter Lippmann, American journalist, 1889-1974

*****

" The notion that journalism can regularly produce a product that violates the fundamental interests of media owners and advertisers ... is absurd."

Robert McChesney, journalist and author

Media page

" [The Laos operation] is something of which we can be proud as Americans.
It has involved virtually no American casualties. What we are getting for our money there ... is, I think, to use the old phrase, very cost effective."

U. Alexis Johnson, US Under Secretary of State in 1971 about American carpet-bombing of Laos which killed hundreds-of-thousands of civilians

*****

"We [the U.S.] have over 200 incidents in which we have put our troops into other countries to force them to our will."

John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

Progressive Media Links -- speaking truth to power

" 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. "

Gore Vidal, novelist and critic

*****

" There's a whole journalistic-industrial complex dedicated to keeping newsprint, TV screens and radio waves clean of destabilizing scoops damaging to corporations or the state."

Alexander Cockburn, journalist

Public relations watch

"The 'corporatization of America' during the past century [has been] an attack on democracy."

Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic

Media Reform


Home Page

Index of Website