Broadcast Media watch
"A 1992 study conducted
by the Center for the Study of Communication at the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst found that people who watched a lot
of TV news had more incorrect answers regarding facts of the day
than those who watched very little TV news."
Lisa Pease, The Assassinations
Books
"The majority of people
believe in incredible things which are absolutely false. The majority
of people daily act in a manner prejudicial to their general well-being."
Ashley Montagu, American anthropologist
"Politicians and the media
have conspired to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public.
At heart, politicians don't believe that Americans can handle
complex truths, and the news media, especially television news,
basically agrees."
Tom Fenton, former CBS foreign
correspondent
"In [Aldous] Huxley's
[Brave New World] vision ... people will come to love their oppression,
to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What [George] Orwell [1984]
feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was
that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be
no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive
us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much
that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared
that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth
would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would
become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial
culture..."
Neil Postman
Articles
"It's an obscene comparison,
but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming
tires around people's necks if they dissented. In some ways, the
fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming
tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. It's that fear
that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions
and to continue to bore in on the tough questions so often. again."
CBS anchor Dan Rather about George
W. Bush's Iraq War
Who Gets To Be Heard
"A 2003 Gallup survey
found 31 percent of respondents receiving their news every day
or several times a week from talk radio... The largest personality-centered
shows are all conservative: Rush Limbaugh has 14.5 million regular
listeners, followed by Sean Hannity (11.8 million), and Michael
Savage (7 million) (De la Vina 2004)... By the mid-1990s, regular
talk radio listeners constituted around 20 percent of U.S. voting
adults (Barker and Knight 2000)."
Jose Padin and Shelley Smith
Low-Power Radio
"Our politics, religion,
news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed
into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest
or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people
on the verge of amusing ourselves to death."
Neil Postman
Media
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- Neil Postman