Quotes on the Media

.

Selected Quotes on the Effects of Mass Media

From E.B. White (“Removal,” One Man’s Meat, New York: Harper & Row, 1938)

“Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the distant and the remote. More hours in every 24 will be spent digesting ideas, sounds, images—distant and concocted. In sufficient accumulation, radio sounds and television sights may become more familiar to us than their originals.”

“When I was a child, people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist-deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.”

“...I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace, or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television—of that I am quite sure.”


From Bill McKibben (The Age of Missing Information, New York: Plume, 1993)

“TV was like a third parent—a source of ideas and information and impressions. And not such a bad parent—always with time to spare, always eager to please, often funny. TV filled dull hours and it made me a cosmopolite at an early age.”

“People who didn’t grow up with television tend not to understand its real power—they already had a real world to compare with the pictures on the screen. People my age didn’t—we were steeped in television, flavored for life.”

“TV is a pipeline to the modern world, and a convenient shorthand for some of its features. Still, that does not mean that TV merely reflects our society. By virtue of its omnipotence, it also constantly reinforces certain ideas.”

“Television is the chief way that most of us partake of the larger world, of the information age, and so, though none of us owes our personalities and habits entirely to the tube and the world it shows, none of us completely escapes its influence either.”

“I don’t fret about TV because it’s decadent or shortens your attention span or leads to murder. It worries me because it alters perception. TV, and the culture it anchors, masks and drowns out the subtle and vital information contact with the real world once provided.”


From Newton Minow, FCC Chairman, to the National Association of Broadcasters, May 9, 1961

“Sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you—and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland....

“Is there one person in this room who claims that broadcasting can’t do better? ... Your trust accounting with your beneficiaries is overdue.”

Thirty years later, in 1991, Minow revisited that statement:

“In the last 30 years, the television marketplace has become a severely distorting influence in at least four important public areas. We have failed 1) to use television for education; 2) to use television for children; 3) to finance public television properly; and 4) to use television properly in political campaigns.”

“...The most important educational institution in America is television. More people learn more each day, each year, each lifetime from television than from any other source. All of television is education; the question is, what are we teaching and what are we learning?”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“In large part, commercial television has abdicated its educational responsibility and concentrated on its ability to amuse. . . . Broadcasters complain that they cannot figure it out: ‘What is an educational show?’ If they don’t know, they should be in the shoe business, not in show business.”

—Peggy Charren, founder, Action for Children’s Television, 1994.

“This business of giving people what they want is a dope pusher’s argument. News is something people don’t know they’re interested in until they hear about it. The job of the journalist is to take what’s important and make it interesting.”

—Reuven Frank, former president, NBC News

“Television-watching Americans — that is, just about all Americans — see approximately 100 TV commercials a day. ... Advertising now infects just about every organ of society, and wherever advertising gains a foothold it tends to slowly take over, like a vampire or a virus.”

—Leslie Savan, author, The Sponsored Life, 1994.

“It’s just hard not to listen to TV—it’s spent so much more time raising us than you have.”

—Bart Simpson, cartoon philosopher-king, 1998

“Televsion is like a flyer somebody sticks on your windshield. Who gives a damn what’s on it? It’s iridescent wallpaper. Sometimes I think people just like the light on their faces.”

—Jerry Seinfeld, TV comedian, 1998

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Have more? Add them under “Comments” below!