Quotes About The Media

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In mass communication, media are the communication outlets or tools used to store and deliver information or data. The term refers to components of the mass media communications industry, such as print media, publishing, the news media, photography, cinema, broadcasting (radio and television), digital media, and advertising.

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The media

The media enlightens people and voices their sentiments and ideas. However, under oppressive rules, it is either a prisoner or a flatterer. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Every writer should be well-mannered in words and behavior, refined in language and writing. Otherwise, much damage can be done for the sake of an illusory good. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Journalists and writers who do not write according to national sentiment and thought represent Babylonian enslavement. – M. Fethullah Gulen

The media should avoid serving individual fancies, for their main purpose is to enlighten and serve the nation as a whole. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Many cranial bones now decaying in graveyards contain books that could not be written because of oppression or censorship. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Quotes About The Media

Quotes About The Media

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 

All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgerize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level. – William Bernbach

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values. – Marshall McLuhan

The media tends to report rumors, speculations, and projections as facts… How does the media do this? By quoting some “expert”… you can always find some expert who will say something hopelessly hopeless about anything. – Peter McWilliams

The news media are, for the most part, the bringers of bad news… and it’s not entirely the media’s fault, bad news gets higher ratings and sells more papers than good news. – Peter McWilliams

The media’s power is frail. Without the people’s support, it can be shut off with the ease of turning a light switch. – Corazon Aquino

For a politician to complain about the press is like a ship’s captain complaining about the sea. – Enoch Powell

Media: 99,99% of what happens is not on the news. – Loesje

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

In day-to-day commerce, television is not so much interested in the business of communications as in the business of delivering audiences to advertisers. People are the merchandise, not the shows. The shows are merely the bait. – Author unknown

People shouldn’t expect the mass media to do investigative stories. That job belongs to the ‘fringe’ media. – Ted Koppel

It’s hard to believe that in the greatest democracy in the world, we need legislation to prevent the government from writing and paying for the news. – Senator John Kerry

Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression. – Marshall McLuhan

The news is staged, anticipated, reported, analyzed until all interest is wrung from it and abandoned for some new novelty. – Thomas Griffith

Media is a word that has come to mean bad journalism. – Graham Greene

A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them. – Marshall McLuhan

National leaders who find themselves wilting under the withering criticisms by members of the media, would do well not to take such criticism personally but to regard the media as their allies in keeping the government clean and honest, its services. – Corazon Aquino

People in the media say they must look at the president with a microscope. Now, I don’t mind a microscope, but boy, when they use a proctoscope, that’s going too far. – Richard M. Nixon

The American people deserve to know that they’re not just watching the administration’s spin on their local newscasts — they’re paying for it, too. – Senator John Kerry   

Homer is new this morning, and perhaps nothing is as old as today’s newspaper. – Charles Peguy

The media have substituted themselves for the older world. Even if we should wish to recover that older world we can do it only by an intensive study of the ways in which the media have swallowed it. – Marshall McLuhan

New media may at first appear as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought. But nobody could make the mistake of supposing that phonetic writing merely made it possible for the Greeks to set down in visual. – Marshall McLuhan

Most of the media… is positioning the merger with Compaq and the recent actions by Walter Hewlett and David Packard as a fight between the past and the future. – Carly Fiorina

Going on the radio is like talking to a nice girl you know; you think of perfect things to say and things to talk about but you can’t premeditate love or the media. – Alex James

Watergate had become the center of the media’s universe, and during the remaining year of my presidency the media tried to force everything else to revolve around it. – Richard M. Nixon

The public relations warriors fought and lost Monte Carlo’s Battle of the Magazine Covers. – John Vinocur

Newspapers, television networks, and magazines have sometimes been outrageously abusive, untruthful, arrogant, and hypocritical. But it hardly follows that elimination of a strong and independent press is the way to eliminate abusiveness . . . – Potter Stewart

The current state of the news media is partially to blame for the public’s general lack of information vital for responsible citizenship in a democracy. The news media has become an aspect of show business, offering merely infotainment. It has evolved into an entity that tends to function as a public relations agency for wealthy and powerful multinational corporations, members of Congress, the current Presidential Administration including the administrations that preceded it. The news media is being utilized as a political tool of suppression and propaganda by those in power, and propaganda is psychological in nature. Full of half-truths and utter misinformation, it’s an arrogant and very commercial strategy that is implemented because it appeals to emotions, fear being the main one relentless talk of national security, personal and community safety, can trigger childhood insecurities and indoctrinated views of authority. – Teresa Stover

A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of ‘monopoly in the means of production.’ – Robert Anton Wilson

We are so cleverly manipulated and influenced by the media and establishments on both the right and left, that the truth has become hopelessly lost in semantics. – Jules Carlysle

Now, they have invented a new war to fire our passion and capture imagination…The War on Christmas. It’s a poorly staged rendition of Wag the Dog interpreted for the morbidly stupid and performed by the criminally insane. – Jules Carlysle

If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hairstyle. – Hillary Clinton

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. – Henry David Thoreau

I could announce one morning that the world was going to blow up in three hours and people would be calling in about my hair! – Katie Couric

Celebrity culture has gone crazy, and I think the reason is that real news is just not bearable, and it also seems impossible to change anything. – Chris Martin

The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain. – Tom Stoppard

I’ve always thought that it’s good to watch the news to find out what everybody else is looking at and believing, if only because that’s how consensus is constructed. – Barbara Kruger

I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon. – Tom Stoppard

Don’t overstate Fox News. It’s still much smaller than the least of the network niches. – Tom Brokaw

Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day – 23 minutes – and that’s supposed to be enough. – Walter Cronkite

I have a liberal definition of news because I think news can be what excites people. I’m not very sanctimonious about what news is and isn’t. – Diane Sawyer

I have very strong theories about magazine publishing. And I think that it is the most personal form of journalism. And I think that a magazine is an old friend. – Hugh Hefner

Television saved the movies. The Internet is going to save the news business. – Matt Drudge

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.Graham Greene

There are only two forces that can carry light to all the corners of the globe… the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here. Mark Twain

The world is for thousands a freak show; the images flicker past and vanish; the impressions remain flat and unconnected in the soul. Thus they are easily led by the opinions of others, are content to let their impressions be shuffled and rearranged and evaluated differently. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognizes neither pity nor pitilessness.John Berger

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village. Marshall McLuhan

A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad. Albert Camus

For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders. Margaret Mead

The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy. Marshall McLuhan

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. Henry David Thoreau

In old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press. Oscar Wilde

We’ve uncovered some embarrassing ancestors in the not-too-distant past. Some horse thieves, and some people killed on Saturday nights. One of my relatives, unfortunately, was even in the newspaper business. Jimmy Carter

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I believe that music is another form of news. Music is another form of journalism to me so I have to cover all the areas with my album. – Lil Wayne

It’s my responsibility as a singer-songwriter to report the news. – John Mellencamp

Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you’re at it. – Horace Greeley

It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper. – Jerry Seinfeld

I have fits of melancholia when I watch the news, but we all do, don’t we? – Julian Fellowes

I can gather all the news I need on the weather report. – Simon and Garfunkel

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media. – Noam Chomsky

If journalism is good, it is controversial, by its nature. – Julian Assange

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. – Malcom X

I spent my time drinking and staring at a television in the airport bar. More death and destruction. Crime. Pollution. All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things I didn’t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers. – John Twelve Hawks

‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’ is a form of service journalism. To be successful, I think it has to be a combination of a good story, it has to be funny, and it also needs to be packed with useful information. – Ted Allen

The central dilemma in journalism is that you don’t know what you don’t know. – Bob Woodward

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. – W. H. Auden

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture. – Allen Ginsberg

I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family it says they’re looting, if you see a white family it says they’re looking for food. – Kanye West

Don’t hate the media, become the media. – Jello Biafra

As a journalist, one tends to think there’s nothing off limits. – Peter Jennings

I’m a soulless lawyer. Give me any opinion and I can argue it. – Megyn Kelly

The liberty of the Press is the Palladium of all the civil, political and religious rights of an Englishman. Junius

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium — that is, of any extension of ourselves — result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. Marshall McLuhan

The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters — there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void. That’s why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.Jean Baudrillard

The press is no substitute for institutions. It is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone. They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions. It is only when they work by a steady light of their own, that the press, when it is turned upon them, reveals a situation intelligible enough for a popular decision.Walter Lippmann

There is a terrific disadvantage in not having the abrasive quality of the press applied to you daily. Even though we never like it, and even though we wish they didn’t write it, and even though we disapprove, there isn’t any doubt that we could not do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press.John F. Kennedy

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.Walter Lippmann

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

Society cannot share a common communication system so long as it is split into warring factions. Bertolt Brecht

Report me and my cause aright. William Shakespeare

The men with the muck-rake are often indispensable to the well-being of society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck. Theodore Roosevelt

It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.Walter Benjamin

Belief is with them mechanical, voluntary: they believe what they are paid for — they swear to that which turns to account. Do you suppose, that after years spent in this manner, they have any feeling left answering to the difference between truth and falsehood? William Hazlitt

The very hirelings of the press, whose trade it is to buoy up the spirits of the people. have uttered falsehoods so long, they have played off so many tricks, that their budget seems, at last, to be quite empty.William Cobbett

It is a misfortune that necessity has induced men to accord greater license to this formidable engine, in order to obtain liberty, than can be borne with less important objects in view; for the press, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master. James Fenimore Cooper

Some newspapers are fit only to line the bottom of bird cages.Spiro Agnew

On leaf of palm, on sedge-wrought roll; on plastic clay and leather scroll, man wrote his thoughts; the ages passed, and lo! the Press was found at last! John Greenleaf Whittier

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

The press, that goiter of the world, swells up with the desire for conquest and bursts with the achievements which every day brings. A week has room for the boldest climax of the human drive for expansion. Karl Kraus

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From Wikiquote

  • Americans remain largely mistrustful of the mass media as 41% currently have “a great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly.” This latest reading represents a four-percentage-point dip since last year and marks the end of improvements in back-to-back years after hitting an all-time low.
    Although trust in the media has edged down this year, it is well above the record low of 32% in 2016 when Republicans’ trust dropped precipitously and drove the overall trust reading down during the divisive presidential campaign. Republicans’ trust is still at a very low level and a wide gap in views of the media among partisans persists as 69% of Democrats say they have trust and confidence in it, while 15% of Republicans and 36% of independents agree.

    • Megan Brenan, “Americans’ Trust in Mass Media Edges Down to 41%”, Gallup, (September 26, 2019).
  • Gallup first measured trust in the mass media in a 1972 survey when 68% of Americans said they trusted it. Similar levels were recorded in 1974 (69%) and 1976 (72%), but two decades later, when Gallup next asked the question, trust had fallen to 53%.
    Although overall trust was at the majority level until 2004, no more than 21% of Americans dating back to 1972 ever said they had the greatest level of trust. Currently, 13% have a great deal of trust, 28% a fair amount, 30% not very much and 28% none at all.

    • Megan Brenan, “Americans’ Trust in Mass Media Edges Down to 41%”, Gallup, (September 26, 2019).
  • Republicans became increasingly mistrustful of the media in 2016 when Trump was campaigning for president and was sharply critical of the media’s coverage of him. Between 2015 and 2016, Republican trust in the mass media fell 18 points to its historical low of 14%, where it remained in 2017. Following a seven-point boost last year, it has returned to 15%. For their part, Democrats have consistently been more trusting of the media than Republicans but rallied around the press and became even more trusting when Trump took office in 2017.
    • Megan Brenan, “Americans’ Trust in Mass Media Edges Down to 41%”, Gallup, (September 26, 2019).
  • Recent Gallup data showed that Republicans’ trust in most specific news sources in recent years has stagnated or declined, while Democrats’ has risen. Fox News is the only national news source with majority-level trust from Republicans while majorities of Democrats trust six national news sources. Likewise, data from last year’s Gallup/Knight Foundation surveys found similar results and also found that Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to perceive bias, inaccuracy and misinformation in newspapers, on television and on radio.
    • Megan Brenan, “Americans’ Trust in Mass Media Edges Down to 41%”, Gallup, (September 26, 2019).
  • The media have long operated as agents of moral indignation in their own right : even if they are not self-consciously engaged in crusading or muck-raking, their very reporting of certain facts can be sufficient to generate anxiety, indignation or panic.
    • Cohen S., Folk Devils and Moral Panics, London, Routledge, 2002, p. 7; as qtd. in Julian Petley, ““Are We Insane ?”. The “Video Nasty” Moral Panic”, Paniques et croisades morales, 43-1, 2012, pp. 35-57.
  • The advertising industry almost exclusively underwrites mass media in the United States. Newspapers obtain 75 to 80 percent of their revenue from advertisers, general circulation magazines about half (Jhally 1990). All revenue for broadcasts such as television and radio programming come from advertising. Clearly, advertising is the economic lifeblood of the media (Kilbourne 1989).
    • Cortese, A. J. (2008). “Provocateur: Images of women and minorities in advertising (3rd ed.)”, Oxford, UK: Rowman & Littlefield, p.4.
  • Research on the effect that the media has on the public revolves around two interconnected issues. Does coverage of sensationalistic and violent crime create fear among the general public and does this fear influence criminal justice policy attitudes? Review of the research indicates that there are mixed results regarding the influence of the news media on creating an attitude of fear among the general public (Surette, 1998). In an early study, Gerbner et al (1980) hypothesized that heavy viewing of television violence leads to fear rather than aggression. Gerbner et al (1980) find that individuals who watch a large amount of television are more likely to feel a greater threat from crime, believe crime is more prevalent than statistics indicate, and take more precautions against crime. They find that crime portrayed on television is significantly more violent, random, and dangerous than crime in the “real” world. The researchers argue that viewers internalize these images and develop a “mean world view” or a scary image of reality. This view is characterized by “mistrust, cynicism, alienation, and perceptions of higher than average levels of threat of crime in society” (Surette, 1990:8). Further studies on the relationship between fear and television viewing indicate a direct and strong relationship (Barille, 1984; Bryant, Carveth and Brown, 1981; Hawkins and Pingree, 1980; Morgan, 1983; Williams, Zabrack and Joy, 1982, Weaver and Wakshlag, 1986). Conversely, Rice and Anderson (1990) find a weak, positive association between television viewing and fear of crime, alienation and distrust. However, multiple regression analysis fails to support the hypothesis that television viewing has a direct, substantial effect on fear of crime.
    • Kenneth Dowler, “Media Consumption and Public Attitudes Toward Crime and Justice: The Relationship Between Fear of Crime, Punitive Attitudes, and Perceived Police Effectiveness”, Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 10(2) (2003) pp.109-110.
  • Presentations of police are often over-dramatized and romanticized by fictional television crime dramas while the news media portray the police as heroic, professional crime fighters (Surette, 1998; Reiner, 1985). In television crime dramas, the majority of crimes are solved and criminal suspects are successfully apprehended (Dominick, 1973; Estep and MacDonald, 1984; Carlson, 1985; Kooistra et al. 1998, Zillman and Wakshlag, 1985). Similarly, news accounts tend to exaggerate the proportion of offenses that result in arrest which projects an image that police are more effective than official statistics demonstrate (Sacco and Fair, 1988; Skogan and Maxfield, 1981; Marsh, 1991; Roshier, 1973). The favorable view of policing is partly a consequence of police’s public relations strategy. Reporting of proactive police activity creates an image of the police as effective and efficient investigators of crime (Christensen, Schmidt and Henderson, 1982). Accordingly, a positive police portrayal reinforces traditional approaches to law and order that involves increased police presence, harsher penalties and increasing police power (Sacco, 1995).
    • Kenneth Dowler, “Media Consumption and Public Attitudes Toward Crime and Justice: The Relationship Between Fear of Crime, Punitive Attitudes, and Perceived Police Effectiveness”, Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 10(2) (2003), p.111.
  • A primary issue with the media’s inaccurate depiction of crime and the criminal justice system is that it socially constructs people’s perceptions about the nature of crime and how the criminal justice system works. Since most people rely on the media for their information about these topics, their perceptions about the system are skewed by this inaccurate information. Additionally, we know that people may act on their perceptions, such as by supporting certain crime and justice programs over others programs that do not fit with their perceptions, but which may be based on more accurate information. Several studies indicate that the images of crime and justice in the media impact the criminal justice system (Duwe, 2000; Hansen, 2001; Potter & Kappeler, 2006; Surette, 2007). For example, Hansen (2001) explains how news coverage of selected high profile juvenile crimes, in combination with coverage of drug and violent crimes in the 1980s and 1990s impacted the creation of get-tough policies for juvenile offenders (e.g., waivers to adult court, longer sentences, etc.).More specifically, the extant literature demonstrates that fictional crime dramas influence viewers’attitudes towards the criminal justice system (Dowler, 2002; Kort-Butler & Sittner-Hartshorn, 2011), its actors (Dowler & Zawilski, 2007;Huey,2010),and increases fear of crime (Eschholz, Chiricos, & Gertz, 2003). One particular concern specific to fictional crime dramas, often referred to as the ‘CSI Effect,’ postulates viewers develop expectations for police and courtroom settings regarding the collection, evaluation, and presentation of physical evidence, including DNA evidence (Dowler, Fleming, & Muzzatti, 2006;Goodman-Delahunty & Tait,2006). Much ofthe general publics’ exposure to crime and the criminal justice system comes fromfictional crime dramas. Since it is possible that the majority of people’s exposure to the criminal justice system is largely through crime fictional dramas, it is important to understand how the system, police specifically, are portrayed in these dramas.
    • Gayle M. Rhineberger-Dunn, “Clearing Crime in Prime-Time: The Disjuncture Between Fiction and Reality”, American Journal of Criminal Justice, (June 2015).
  • In the average American household, the television is turned “on” for almost seven hours each day, and the typical adult or child watches two to three hours of television per day. It is estimated that the average child sees 360,000 advertisements by the age of eighteen (Harris, 1989). Due to this extensive exposure to mass media depictions, the media’s influence on gender role attitudes has become an area of considerable interest and concern in the past quarter century. Analyses of gender portrayals have found predominantly stereotypic portrayals of dominant males nurturant females within the contexts of advertisements (print and television), magazines fiction, newspapers, child-oriented print media, textbooks, literature, film, and popular music (Busby, 1975; DurMn, 1985a; Leppard, Ogletree, & Wallen, 1993; Lovdal, 1989; Pearson, Turner, & Todd-Mancillas, 1991; Rudmann & Verdi, 1993; Signorielli & Lears, 1992). Most of the research to date on the effects of gender-role images in the media has focused primarily on the female gender role. A review of research on men in the media suggests that, except for film literature, the topic of masculinity has not been addressed adequately (Fejes, 1989). Indeed, as J. Kate (1995) recently noted, “there is a glaring absence of a thorough body of research into the power of cultural images of masculinity” (p. 133). Kate suggests that studying the impact of advertising represents a useful place to begin addressing this lacuna.
    • Garst, J., Bodenhausen, G. V. (1997). “Advertising’s effects on men’s gender role attitudes”, Sex Roles, 36, pp.551-552.
  • There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is innately media-related.
    • William Gibson, Official blog at williamgibsonbooks.com (31 October 2004).
  • The media are slavishly subservient to the entertainment desires of their audience.
    • Patrick J. Hurley, A Concise Introduction to Logic (2000 [Seventh edition], Wadsworth, ISBN 0-534-52006-5), p. 595
  • Insofar as the quantity of new products is an indicator of the health of a cultural sector, the first decade of the new millennium was a veritable golden age in the United States. The number of new albums released more than doubled in the period, from 35,516 in 2000 to 79,695 in 2007 (Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf 2009). The number of Hollywood films released ranged between 370 and 460 in the 1990 and between 450 and 928 in the 2000s, with the peak year in 2006 and some 677 produced in 2009 (MPAA 2006, 2010). Software industry growth has been dramatic, averaging 20%-30% annually until 2009. The video-game sector averaged nearly 17% growth between 2005 and 2008, with growth rates in 2007 and 2008 of 28% and 23% (Siweck 2010) According to the IIPA, the core copyright industries in the United States averaged 5.8% growth between 2003 and 2007 – well above the roughly 3% annual US growth rate in the period (Siwek 2009). According to the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, total media and entertainment spending posted an annual growth rate of 5.3% in the United States between 2002 and 2008 and 6.4% globally (WAN-IFRA 2008). Losses to piracy need to be placed in this context of overall industry growth – and in some cases remarkably rapid growth.
    • Joe Karaganis, “Media Piracy in Emerging Economies”, (2011), pp. 40-41.
  • When the war finally started, we were ready. On January 16, 1991, CNN anchor Bernard Shaw reported to the world, “The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated . . .”
    As predicted, Iraqi power and communications systems were destroyed by stealth fighter jets and cruise missiles. Every media company based in Baghdad—except CNN—lost power and transmission capabilities. Only CNN broadcast live to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. All channels turned to us for exclusive coverage; there was no place else.
    Back then CNN was the only global 24/7 news channel. That live coverage of war—the first time it had been televised worldwide—transformed the media landscape. CNN became required viewing for informed citizens and heads of state, the one truly global news source. That has changed now, with multiple cable networks and news breaking on social media. But without the investment in journalism from visionary owners such as Turner, today’s networks focus more on commentary than newsgathering.

    • Tom Johnson, “Desert Storm: The first war televised live around the world (and around the clock)”, Atlanta Magazine, (March 18, 2015).
  • The hypothesis that media violence increases aggressive behavior has been widely studied in experimental research looking at the short-term effects of exposure to violent media stimuli, as well as in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies relating habitual media violence exposure to individual differences in the readiness to show aggressive behavior. Although there is disagreement among some researchers as to whether or not the evidence currently available supports the view that media violence exposure is a risk factor for aggression (Huesmann & Taylor, 2003), most meta-analyses and reviews have reported substantial effect sizes across different media, methodologies, and outcome variables, suggesting that exposure to violent media contents increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior in the short term as well as over time (e.g., Anderson et al., 2003; Bushman & Huesmann, 2006; Huesmann, 1982; Huesmann & Kirwil, 2007; Murray, 2008; Paik & Comstock, 1994). Other authors have questioned both the strength of the evidence and its implications (e.g., Ferguson, 2007; Savage & Yancey, 2008). Ferguson and Kilburn (2009, 2010) concluded from their meta-analysis that there was no support for the claim that media violence increases aggressive behavior. However, they acknowledged that experimental studies using proxy measures of aggression did produce substantive effect sizes and were relatively unaffected by publication bias, and their conclusions have been vigorously disputed by others (Anderson et al., 2010; Bushman, Rothstein, & Anderson, 2010; Huesmann, 2010).
    • Barbara Krahé, Ingrid Möller, L. Rowell Huesmann, Lucyna Kirwil, Juliane Felber, and Anja Berger, “Desensitization to Media Violence: Links With Habitual Media Violence Exposure, Aggressive Cognitions, and Aggressive Behavior”, J Pers Soc Psychol. 2011 Apr; 100(4): 630–646.
  • Several studies have shown that in the long run, habitual exposure to media violence may reduce anxious arousal in response to depictions of violence. Research has found that the more time individuals spent watching violent media depictions, the less emotionally responsive they became to violent stimuli (e.g., Averill, Malstrom, Koriat, & Lazarus, 1972) and the less sympathy they showed for victims of violence in the real world (e.g., Mullin & Linz, 1995). Bartholow, Bushman, and Sestir (2006) used event-related brain potential data (ERPs) to compare responses by violent and nonviolent video game users to violent stimuli and relate them to subsequent aggressive responses in a laboratory task. Bartholow et al. found that the more violent games participants played habitually, the less brain activity they showed in response to violent pictures and the more aggressively they behaved in the subsequent task. In a series of studies with children age 5 to 12, Funk and colleagues demonstrated that habitual usage of violent video games was associated with reduced empathy with others in need of help (Funk, Baldacci, Pasold, & Baumgardner, 2004; Funk, Buchman, Jenks, & Bechtoldt, 2003).
    • Barbara Krahé, Ingrid Möller, L. Rowell Huesmann, Lucyna Kirwil, Juliane Felber, and Anja Berger, “Desensitization to Media Violence: Links With Habitual Media Violence Exposure, Aggressive Cognitions, and Aggressive Behavior”, J Pers Soc Psychol. 2011 Apr; 100(4): 630–646.
  • An alternative perspective on the relationship between anxious and pleasant arousal may be derived from the general aggression model extended by Carnagey et al. (2007), to include desensitization. They argued that because repeated exposure to media violence reduces the anxiety reaction to violence, new presentations of violence “instigate different cognitive and affective reactions than would have occurred in the absence of desensitization” (p. 491). One such affective reaction may be a positive response to violence that would otherwise have been inhibited by anxious arousal. Huesmann and Kirwil (2007) have called this process sensitization. They argued that, for some individuals, watching violence is enjoyable, and, whereas it may provoke anger, it does not produce anxious arousal. On the contrary, the more such individuals watch violence, the more they like watching it. They are experiencing a “sensitization” of positive feelings. Because finding violence pleasant is incompatible with experiencing anxious arousal, increased pleasant arousal to depictions of violence in individuals with a high exposure to media violence would constitute indirect evidence of desensitization of “negative feelings” about violence. On the basis of this line of reasoning, we propose that anxious arousal by violent media stimuli is negatively related to pleasant arousal and that habitual exposure to media violence should both decrease negative emotional reactions and increase positive emotional reactions to violence, though the increase in positive emotions may occur for only a subset of individuals. For example, in a recent study of young adults in Poland, Kirwil (2008) found that proactively aggressive individuals tended to respond to violent media stimuli with a reduction in anxious arousal, whereas reactively aggressive individuals tended to respond with an increase in enjoyment.
    • Barbara Krahé, Ingrid Möller, L. Rowell Huesmann, Lucyna Kirwil, Juliane Felber, and Anja Berger, “Desensitization to Media Violence: Links With Habitual Media Violence Exposure, Aggressive Cognitions, and Aggressive Behavior”, J Pers Soc Psychol. 2011 Apr; 100(4): 630–646.
  • The incredibly sinister role of the press, the cinema, the radio, has consisted in passing that original reality through a pair of flattening rollers to substitute for it a superimposed pattern of ideas an images with no real roots in the deep being of the subject of this experiment.
    • Gabriel Marcel, Man Against Mass Society (1952), p. 141
  • One potential pitfall of genetic research on eating disorders is the misinterpretation that environmental factors such as the media do not matter. Western media’s idealization of an ultra-thin female body type has long been viewed as an important sociocultural risk factor for eating disorders. However, given the ubiquity of this influence in Western cultures, other factors must influence vulnerability to the thin cultural ideal. As Bulik suggests, genetically vulnerable individuals might seek out experiences, such as exposure to thin-ideal media images, which reinforce their negative body image. This hypothesis is supported by a longitudinal study which found that adolescent girls whose eating disorder symptomatology increased over a 16 month period also reported significantly greater fashion magazine reading at Time 2, compared with Time.
    • Mazzeo, SE; Bulik, CM (2009). “Environmental and genetic risk factors for eating disorders: What the clinician needs to know”. Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America. 18 (1): 67–82. doi:10.1016/j.chc.2008.07.003. PMC 2719561. PMID 19014858.
  • Of course the news people are pushing fear. That’s their drug, making everybody scared, as if life’s not scary enough. News fear isn’t real.
    • Susan Palwick, Windows, reprinted in Joe Hill (ed.) 2015 Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy (2015), ISBN 978-0-544-44977-0, p. 165
  • Portrayals of sexual relationships in mainstream media are prevalent and complex. Content analyses estimate that sexual content appears in approximately 85% of major motion pictures (Jamieson et al., 2008), 82% of television programs (Fisher et al., 2004), 59% of music videos (Turner, 2011), 37% of music lyrics (Primack, Gold, Schwarz, & Dalton, 2008), 22% of radio segments (Gentile, 1999), and 21% of magazine headlines (Davalos, Davalos, & Layton, 2007). The portrayals are not uniform, but instead come in multiple forms— explicit and implied; verbal and nonverbal; reality based or wholly fictional; and covering a range of themes, tones (e.g., humorous or serious; positive or negative), and consequences. Consider, for example, each of the following scenarios: a sitcom episode in which a sex-starved husband devises a complex lie to make his wife have sympathy for him so she will sleep with him; a music video in which a young man encourages his two female companions to kiss each other while he watches; a magazine article that instructs young women on how to flirt successfully. In each instance the content is not necessarily sexually explicit (i.e., pornography), but the images, dialogue, storylines, and character portrayals nonetheless offer substantial insight into how sexual relationships are initiated, maintained, nourished, and terminated.
    • Lauren A. Reed, “Sexuality and entertainment media”, in Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology, Volume 2: Contextual Approaches, Chapter: Sexuality and entertainment media, Publisher: American Psychological Association, Editors: D. Tolman, L. M. Diamond, J. Bauermeister, J, William, G, Pfaus, J, Ward, L.M., (January 2013),
  • While much of the focus of present-day media praise and damnation seems focused on video sources (including those online), radio “was there first.” Many complaints about present-day television and cable were first directed at radio, such as a fear that violent or suspenseful programs would overly excite children’s imaginations with untold effects over time. Radio also established many elements of present-day electronic media industry structure. Much of what we both enjoy and bemoan today, in other words, was accomplished (or inflicted) by radio long before television or more recent digital options became a reality.
    For example, that American broadcasting would depend on advertising was pretty much decided by the late 1920s, despite several concerted efforts (before and after passage of the benchmark 1934 Communications Act) to open up greater opportunities for other funding options. In turn, advertising support meant that American radio would be primarily a medium of entertainment (to attract the largest possible audience for that advertising) rather than the public or cultural service that developed in nations with other approaches to financial support. That national networks would dominate radio news and entertainment in the years before the coming of television (which would later and very quickly adopt the same patterns) was a fact by the early 1930s with only minor modifications at the margins over the years. The government would have to selectively license broadcaster access to limited spectrum space was obvious by the early 1920s; such a process only became fully effective in 1927. And that government would have little to do with American radio program content, though this has again varied over time, was made clear in the laws of 1927 and 1934, reinforced by numerous court decisions in the years that followed.

    • Christopher H. Sterling; Cary O’Dell, “The Concise Encyclopedia of American Radio”, (9 February 2011), Routledge, p. vi.
  • Conservatives will never win (the American culture war) if they imagine themselves as combatants atop defensive battlements, hurling abuse on the mass media.

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