Jens Martin Skibsted Quotes

Today we live in a world now where it is easy to confuse truth and popularity. And you can use money to amplify whatever you believe and get people to believe what is popular is now truthful. And what is not popular may not be truthful.

When people read 'Breitbart' every single day and convince themselves that Barack Obama is a foreign terrorist, that is not a problem of government. That is a problem of community failure, and we have to recognize that.

If you go and talk to most people, they mean well but they don't have much of a breadth on education, of knowledge of understanding what the real issues are and therefore they listen to pundits on television who tell them what they are supposed to think and they keep repeating that until pretty soon they say, 'Oh, well that must be true.'

I've been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are.

The left and the right live in parallel universes. The right listens to talk radio, the left's on the Internet and they just reinforce one another. They have no sense of reality. I have now one ambition: to retire before it becomes essential to tweet.

A lot of people believe what other people say.

I think it's a very firm part of human nature that if you surround yourself with like-minded people, you'll end up thinking more extreme versions of what you thought before.

We all get swept up in the hype machine. Nobody is immune to that.

You don't change anybody's mind with political humor. You just reinforce what people already believe.

We now have access to so much information that we can find support for any prejudice or opinion.

Facts just don’t mean anything anymore. It’s who shouts the loudest and repeats it the most.

A lot of stories that aren't true get out into the mainstream, and it's hard to correct that. People want to hear what they already believe.

I am ultimately convinced that people must first be told that so and so is great, and then, after a period of given time, they come to believe it for themselves.

Allegations become facts, and facts become truth in the eyes of the public, whether they are true or not.

We are drowning in partisan rhetoric that is just true enough not to be a lie; in industry-sponsored research; in social media's imitation of human connection; in legalese and corporate double-speak.

There is a danger, increasingly, that we're in a post-fact society where it seems my ignorance is as good as your facts.

The polls demonstrate that 50 percent of Americans who get their news from TV think Saddam Hussein was behind the Twin Towers attack. Man, have they got ways for getting half-truths out right away now, thanks to TV! I think TV is a calamity in a democracy.

Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.

The public is gullible. ... If [many satirists are] making the same joke, that's the danger. Then there's a solidifying effect and it becomes a truth.

Public opinion can be influential, the media can be influential.

When you're surrounded by people who share the same set of assumptions as you, you start to think that's reality.

Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.

The thought that so many people get their news from social media really is scary.

I think the media spends a lot of time fooling itself.