Media Manipulation Quotes

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

“People will always try to scare you into things. Scare you away from things. Scare you into not wanting things you can't help wanting. You can't be afraid.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“Manipulating the media is akin to poisoning a nation’s water supply – it affects all of our lives in unimaginable ways.”
― Lance Morcan, The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy

“There was a time when we used to have opinions, just humble opinions. Now everything seems to be a question of life and death. We defend, we abuse, we call names, we shout....is it because every idiot in town suddenly found a voice through social media or are intelligent people getting dumber trying to defend arguments which an idiot won't understand. I don't belong to either so I just wonder...”
― EverSkeptic

“Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing”
― Robert Bresson

“(Talking about the movement to deny the prevalence and effects of adult sexual exploitation of children)
So what does this movement consist of? Who are the movers and shakers? Well molesters are in it, of course. There are web pages telling them how to defend themselves against accusations, to retain confidence about their ‘loving and natural’ feelings for children, with advice on what lawyers to approach, how to complain, how to harass those helping their children. Then there’s the Men’s Movements, their web pages throbbing with excitement if they find ‘proof’ of conspiracy between feminists, divorcing wives and therapists to victimise men, fathers and husbands.
Then there are journalists. A few have been vitally important in the US and Britain in establishing the fightback, using their power and influence to distort the work of child protection professionals and campaign against children’s testimony. Then there are other journalists who dance in and out of the debates waggling their columns behind them, rarely observing basic journalistic manners, but who use this debate to service something else – a crack at the welfare state, standards, feminism, ‘touchy, feely, post-Diana victimhood’. Then there is the academic voice, landing in the middle of court cases or inquiries, offering ‘rational authority’. Then there is the government. During the entire period of discovery and denial, not one Cabinet minister made a statement about the prevalence of sexual abuse or the harm it caused.
Finally there are the ‘retractors’. For this movement to take off, it had to have ‘human interest’ victims – the accused – and then a happy ending – the ‘retractors’. We are aware that those ‘retractors’ whose parents trail them to newspapers, television studios and conferences are struggling. Lest we forget, they recanted under palpable pressure.”
― Beatrix Campbell, Stolen Voices: The People and Politics Behind the Campaign to Discredit Childhood Testimony

“Today a story is not told it's sold.”
― Amit Abraham

“Murder cases are like cancer cells. Once they get their hooks into you, the pain and misery just keep on spreading. Whether the killer gets caught or the investigation is brought to a successful conclusion doesn't make any difference; it's almost impossible to stop the advance of the disease.”
― Keigo Higashino, A Death in Tokyo

“I’m always talking about the internet and what’s happening now, so cancel culture is something I’m interested in as a phenomenon, but I don’t want it to come across like I’m butt-hurt about it because, honestly, I don’t really care. Because what is cancelling? People start a social media account and once they get more than 300 followers they can’t see their audience as anything but an audience, something to be performed to — which is why you get the weird thing of your mate who works in a brewery talking on Facebook like he’s talking to a packed convention centre. When you’re performing to an audience, the only human inclination is to be the benevolent protagonist. You’d never assume the role of the antagonist — that’s why trolls exist with anonymity. People who actually put themselves out there, online, their role is to be the good guy. We’re not aware of the solipsism of this behaviour because we’re all doing it. So once a week, culture generates a baddie so all the good guys can go: ‘Look how good I am in opposition to how bad he is.’ And the reason we forget about whatever morally [dubious] thing that person has done a week later is because we don’t care. It’s all literally a performance. There’s a purposeful removal of context in order to seem virtuous that happens so constantly that people can’t even be arsed.”
― Matty Healy

“The powerful can overpower the power of the pen but then they cannot write with water.”
― Amit Abraham

“Before the event it is too early for the possible.
After the event it is too late for the possible.
It is too late also for representation, and nothing will really be able to account for it. September 11 th, for example, is there first - only then do its possibility and its causes catch up with it, through all the discourses that will attempt to explain it. But it is as impossible to represent that event) as it was to forecast it before it occurred. The CIA's experts had at their disposal all the information on the possibility of an attack, but they simply didn't believe in it. It was beyond imagining. Such an event always is. It is beyond all possible causes (and perhaps even, as Italo Svevo suggests, causes are merely a misunderstanding that prevents the world from being what it is).
We have, then, to pass through the non-event of news coverage (information) to detect what resists that coverage. To find, as it were, the 'living coin' of the event. To make a literal analysis of it, against all the machinery of commentary and stage-management that merely neutralizes it.
Only events set free from news and information (and us with them) create a fantastic longing. These alone are 'real', since there is nothing to explain them and the imagination welcomes them with open arms.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“It is fair to argue that conservative and liberal media in the West are two sides of the same coin. I personally see CNN and Fox News as complementing not contradicting each other. The former gives viewers the false impression of being liberal and critical of the system, while the latter vehemently promotes and defends the existing militaristic, racist, and supremacist system in place. The former gives the world the false impression of freedom and democracy where everything and everyone can be criticized and held accountable (which is far from the truth), while the latter constantly agitates the public to ensure that the predominantly militaristic, capitalist, and racist system remains intact. The outside world thinks that America is so free to have a newspaper like the NYTimes, but they don’t realize that the system operates precisely as Fox News wants it to.”
― Louis Yako

“Victims are told not to say anything about the proceedings, because talking openly about your case can annoy your judge and benefit the defence. Abuses are not really known for their ability to practice this level of self-restraint, giving them control over there narrative around your case—and since court cases are frequently considered newsworthy events, this can give them a whole new platform to recruit more supporters.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“I sometimes think as if I am corporate media; I put myself in their shoes: If I could profit off a situation, how would I spin it for the maximum amount of traffic yet still be taken seriously? This, I believe when listening, reading, or watching, helps to discern truth from fact and decipher fact from fiction. It helps to weed out the sensationalism, and you gain a more accurate depiction of the world's actual condition.”
― Criss Jami

“Much effort has gone into using weather weapons to create a global warming effect around the world, which the new world order can exploit for political gain and mainstream media false flag publicity.”
― William Dingwall, What Happened When I Was Asleep

“The fact that Fox news condones or glorifies Trump’s deeds or those of his supporters, while CNN supposedly bashes him or his supporters doesn’t necessarily indicate that these two channels, both controlled by the wealthy, are divided on Trump. It is more an indication that their coverage of him and his supporters is for the purpose of keeping the American people fighting with each other instead of together against the wealthy and the powerful.

[From “The Trump Age: Critical Questions” published on CounterPunch on June 23, 2023]”
― Louis Yako

“I’d rather listen to the ramblings of a drunkard than get myself engrossed with the media and its appalling news.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes

“Regarding conspiracy theorists:
So many people calling out others for being 'conspiracy theorists' serves to prove that very point: there is a conspiracy.”
― Kurt Seapoint

“Who declared that these people are in the center? If you took a poll, their positions are radically out of step with those of most
Americans. Network television declares them to be the center. It doesn’t matter what you thought you saw; the media will tell you what you saw. They say nothing—which tells you everything.”
― Gary J. Floyd, Barbarians in the Halls of Power

“What an opportunity the senior Bachchan lost to make a difference to the prejudiced heads by making a statement against the mangalik nonsense. Oh how small really the Big B is, and how big the media made Diana the small. It’s incredible how her quest for lust was portrayed as her search for love! No faulting her taking a lover on the rebound as her man thrust a rival into her marital life but for the media to picture her bed hopping as her craving for love is galling indeed. Why in picturing Diana as the icon of love the media made lust a synonym of love and what’s worse, it made a villain out of her man who embodies the best of love that is constancy.”
― B.S. Murthy, Glaring Shadow - A Stream of Consciousness Novel

“Conditioned by popular media’s consistently negative portraits of children and youth, adults today have been doubly misled about their own children and youth.”
― Adam F.C. Fletcher, Democracy Deficit Disorder: Learning Democracy with Young People

“The media is no longer the message. It's the malware.”
― Michael P. Naughton

“The media is the malware.”
― Michael P. Naughton

“The media primarily gives the microphone to voices that toe the line — voices that keep the masses under tight control, like a sedative. And as we listen to these voices or read what they have to say, we don’t have to think much because they’re basically regurgitating a spiel that we’ve heard a million times before.”
― Vanessa de Largie

“The mainstream media continues to equate feminism, as such, with liberal feminism. But far from providing the solution, liberal feminism is part of the problem. Centered in the global North among the professional-managerial stratum, it is focused on “leaning-in” and “cracking the glass ceiling.” Dedicated to enabling a smattering of privileged women to climb the corporate ladder and the ranks of the military, it propounds a market-centered view of equality that dovetails perfectly with the prevailing corporate enthusiasm for “diversity.” Although it condemns “discrimination” and advocates “freedom of choice,” liberal feminism steadfastly refuses to address the socioeconomic constraints that make freedom and empowerment impossible for the large majority of women. Its real aim is not equality, but meritocracy. Rather than seeking to abolish social hierarchy, it aims to “diversify” it, “empowering” “talented” women to rise to the top. In treating women simply as an “underrepresented group,” its proponents seek to ensure that a few privileged souls can attain positions and pay on a par with the men of their own class.”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

“What is formed and framed through the technological grasp and circulation of the visual and discursive dimensions of war? This grasping and circulation is already an interpretive manoeuvre, a way of giving an account of whose life is a life, and whose life is effectively transformed into an instrument, a target, or a number, or is affected with only a trace remaining or none at all.”
― Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?

“The aforementioned writers, researchers, managers, and newsmakers do not live in a bubble, hermetically sealed away from that which they describe. They are as affected, influenced, pushed, and changed by unfolding global events as any of the rest of us. As such, analysis of the news is, substantially, analysis of the society that produces it. Analysis of news language and the frames of knowledge that accompany it is a critique of social values, an examination of political priorities, and an unveiling of the ideological predispositions embraced at the site of news media production.”
― Luke Peterson, Palestine-Israel in the Print News Media

“The greatest rebellion is not against society, but against the self you were told to become. To unbecome is to begin again, to find the raw, unshaped core of who you are and who you might be." -Jop Helm”
― Jop Helm, COVERT CONTROL: Unveiling the Dark Art of Social Manipulation

“You are not lost. You are buried—under expectations, under routines, under the weight of a life you did not choose. Dig yourself out. Or better yet, set it all ablaze and rise from the ashes." - Jop Helm”
― Jop Helm, COVERT CONTROL: Unveiling the Dark Art of Social Manipulation

“The Lie said to the Truth-
"Let's take a bath together,
the well water is very nice.

The Truth, still suspicious,
tested the water and found out
it really was nice.

So they got naked and bathed.

But suddenly, the Lie leapt out of the water
and fled, wearing the clothes of the Truth.
The Truth, furious, climbed out of the well
to get her clothes back.

But the World, upon seeing the naked Truth,
looked away, with anger and contempt.

Poor Truth returned to the well and disappeared
forever, hiding her shame.

Since then, the Lie runs around the world,
dressed as the Truth, and society is very happy.
Because the world has no desire to know
the naked Truth.”
― Jean-Léon Gérome, Jean-Léon Gérôme - Paintings & Drawings