{"quotes":[{"text":"It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it.","author":"John Pilger","tags":["journalism","media","politics"],"id":566,"author_id":"John+Pilger"},{"text":"I pick up a copy of Newsweek on the plane and immediately notice how biased, slanted, and opinionated all the U.S. Newsmagazine articles are. Not that the Euro and British press aren't biased as well--they certainly are--but living in the United States we are led to believe, and are constantly reminded, that our press is fair and free of bias. After such a short time away, I am shocked at how obviously and blatantly this lie is revealed--there is the 'reporting' that is essentially parroting what the White House press secretary announces; the myriad built-in assumptions that one ceases to register after being somewhere else for a while. The myth of neutrality is an effective blanket for a host of biases.","author":"David Byrne","tags":["213","bias","media"],"id":1782,"author_id":"David+Byrne"},{"text":"I always said I'm just an instrument; I'm transparent, like a medium, the language passes through me. Which is a bit like saying I'm a recording device, I start and I go. I had a real connection to ongoing, language production in real time.","author":"Constance Dejong","tags":["language","media","performance"],"id":3242,"author_id":"Constance+Dejong"},{"text":"The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.","author":"Margaret Atwood","tags":["journalism","journalists","media","newspapers"],"id":4048,"author_id":"Margaret+Atwood"},{"text":"I believe that a person's thoughts often manifest into actual events - that we think things into existence. Right? Well, think about this: one of the illnesses that has become an epidemic in the Western world is an addiction to news. Newspapers, Internet news, 24-hour news channels. And what is news? News is history in the making. So the addiction to news is the addiction to the outcome of history. Are you with me so far?''I get it. Go on.''In the past couple of decades, news has been produced as entertainment. So people's addiction to news is the addiction to its function as entertainment. If you combine the power of thought with this addiction to entertaining news, then the part of the hundreds of millions of people, the viewing public, that wishes peace on earth is overshadowed by the part of them that wants the next chapter in the story. Every person who turns on the news and finds there's no developments is disappointed. They're checking the news two or three times a day - they want drama, and drama means not only death but death by the thousands, so in the secrets parts of themselves, every news-addicted person is hoping for greater calamity, more bodies, more spectacular wars, more hideous enemy attacks, and these wishes are going out every day into the world. Don't you see? Right now, more than at any other time in history, the universal wish is a black one.","author":"Steve Toltz","tags":["addiction","media","news","power-of-thought"],"id":5182,"author_id":"Steve+Toltz"},{"text":"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.","author":"Aysha Taryam","tags":["arab-media","arab-spring","freedom-of-the-press","journalism","media","media-studies"],"id":6139,"author_id":"Aysha+Taryam"},{"text":"...When the public nerve is aroused, the most impressive capacity of man is his skill for lying.","author":"Barbara Kingsolver","tags":["barbara-kingsolver","lying","media","the-lacuna"],"id":6668,"author_id":"Barbara+Kingsolver"},{"text":"I don't underestimate audiences' intelligence. Audiences are much brighter than media gives them credit for. When people went to a movie once a week in the 1930s and that was their only exposure to media, you were required to do a different grammar.","author":"Michael Mann","tags":["week","media","people "],"id":8678,"author_id":"Michael+Mann"},{"text":"Black and awkward is the worst, because black people are stereotyped as being anything but awkward in mainstream media... Black people are always portrayed to be cool or overly dramatic, anything but awkward.","author":"Issa Rae","tags":["media","people","black "],"id":10179,"author_id":"Issa+Rae"},{"text":"I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don't know, a little under 35,00 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.","author":"Martha Wells","tags":["entertainment","humor","media","murder"],"id":10709,"author_id":"Martha+Wells"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":739,"pages":74,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}