“By using myths which explain, justify, and sometimes even glamorize the prevailing conditions of existence, manipulators secure popular support for a social order that is not in the majority’s long term real interest. When manipulation is successful, alternative social arrangements remain unconsidered. …Myths are used to dominate people. When they are inserted unobtrusively into popular consciousness, as they are by the cultural-informational apparatus, their strength is great because most individuals remain unaware that they have been manipulated. The process of control is made still more effective by the special form in which the myth is transmitted. The technique of transmission can in itself add an extra dimension to the manipulative process. What we find, in fact, is that the form of the communication, as developed in market economies, and in the United States in particular, is an actual embodiment of consciousness control.”
-Herbert Schiller,The Mind Managers, 1974."One of the more interesting concepts of propaganda -- at least propaganda in Western societies --is that it's a propaganda of integration, that it's not an overt practice, that it is something that has to take place over a long period of time; it has to be fairly common; it has to be integrated into everyday life."
-Richard Bolton, Professor of Visual Arts, MIT.
“If you are not careful the media will have you hating the people who are oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
-Malcolm X
‘‘Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have.’’
-Richard Salant, former President of CBS News.
"To me entertainment is a poisonous concept. The idea of entertainment is that it has nothing to do with the serious problems of the world but that it fills up an idle hour. Actually, there is an ideology implicit in every kind of fictional story. Fiction may be far more important than non-fiction in forming people's opinions."
-Erik Barnouw, Television as a Medium, 1972.
“I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology…Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called education. Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part…It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.
…The subject will make great strides when it is taken by scientists under a scientific dictatorship... Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated.”
-Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society, 1951.
"The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality, and reality is less than television.”
-Professor Brian O’Blivion, Videodrome, 1983.
"World War III will be a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation."
-Marshall McLuhan |
