Neil Young Quotes

Very big business is in bed with very big government in Washington, and has more to do with what the average person sees, hears and reads than most people know.

In the United States, both the upper levels of the Republican and Democratic Parties are in the pay of the corporate media and communication giants.

Increasingly, people have very little tolerance for anything that smacks of propaganda.

And we've become very doubtful of our information sources, because they're all controlled by these huge multilateral corporations.

The crush of lobbyists on Washington and purchase of the media by corporations has created a big business-run government and a worthless press leaving Americans screwed and ill-informed.

People are entitled to believe the government is constantly lying to them, but it isn't.

Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news.

In the corporate-owned media, men dressed like Ronald Reagan and women dressed like Rita Hayworth disseminate grotesque exaggerations and gossip in authoritative tones.

From forty years' experience of the wretched guess-work of the newspapers of what is not done in the open daylight, and of their falsehood even as to that, I rarely think them worth reading, and almost never worth notice.

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

We suffer quite as much from exaggerated, hysterical, and untruthful statements in the press as from any wrongdoing by businessmen or politicians.

The media is really failing the American people.

...the mass media. What are they? They're huge corporations, massive corporations, linked up with even bigger corporations. They sell audiences to other businesses, namely advertisers. So when you turn on the television set, CBS doesn't make any money. They make money from the advertisers. You're the product that they're selling, and the same is true of the daily newspaper. They're huge corporations, selling audiences, potential consumers, to other businesses, all linked up closely to the government, especially the big media. What picture of the world do you expect them to present?

The handful of corporations that own most of the media outlets have an interest in reflecting establishment views.

It is sad that some people in the media like to create stories to sell their media, without any real facts to back up their stories.

Ego trips by coteries of self-exalting people are treated in the media as idealism, rather than the petty tyranny it is.

...the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are beholden to industry. They always will be. And, the American people are fooled when they think that if you can just get McGovern instead of Humphrey, or if you can get a Democrat instead of a Republican, this will be the end of our problems.

Democracy is one person, one vote and a full discussion of the issues that affect us. Oligarchy is billionaires buying elections, voter suppression and a concentrated corporate media determining what we see, hear and read.

I think the media is among the most dishonest groups of people I've ever met.

The truth is I am beholden to no one, nobody's gonna tell me what to do, no - no group that owns a military firm that gives military supplies. Because I know - I've heard the case where often times you wanna buy certain weapons or something and you like one but you get the other one because that one has a contact to our politicians.

Shall the railroads govern the country, or shall the people govern the railroads? Shall the interest of railroad kings be chieflyregarded, or shall the interest of the people be paramount?

It's not in the interest of the corporations who own the networks to actually be educating the American people so that are debating the real issues. It's much better to deflect attention away from issues and get into the story of the day.

Keep in mind, the news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class-the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn't want you to know something, it won't be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them, and then rarely followed up.

The media, itself an arm of mega-corporate power, feeds the fear industry, so that people are primed like pumps to support wars on rumor, innuendo, legends, and lies.

At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.