Noam Chomsky Quotes

It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale.

Everyone in China knows The Topics. The television stations and newspapers run the same state-generated stories all across the country, and the Chinese form their opinions based on these somewhat controlled sources.

And, consequently, the art of propaganda or public information becomes one of the most powerful forms of directive statesmanship.

One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.

We have an open society. No one will come and take me away for saying what I am saying. But they don't have to, if they can control how many people hear it. And that's how they do it.

The American people should be made aware of the trend toward monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of more and more power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands.

The shooting war is over, here! ... with one phase over I am now up to my neck on the control phase. We will rigidly control all newspapers, films theatre, radio music, etc., in Germany! My division now publishes 8 newspapers in Germany, with 1,000,000 circulation and sends 2 million plus language papers each day by air for displaced persons and POWs. Biggest newspaper enterprise in the world.

Every political persuasion has something they want to get off the screen.

If the American President had control of the media, his job would be much easier.

The secret to modern propaganda is to simplify and repeat.

In order to govern you have to feed the news cycle

The primary purpose of the media is to mobilize support for the controlling interests.

There has never been an atrocity or a genocide without propaganda behind it.

The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen, and the far spread magazine, rules the country.

In China, there is a long history of the government not revealing information, so it’s difficult for the Chinese people to ever know the truth. It is vital that we try to bring that truth to life.

One of the gratifying things, I think, about the end of my presidency even though admittedly my successor ran against a lot of what we stood for, is when you look at the individual issues and the progress that we've made on a lot of those issues, we got the support of a pretty decent majority.

As we [with Edward Herman] discuss there [in Manufacturing Consent] and elsewhere, recognition of the importance of "manufacturing consent" has become an ever more central theme in the more free societies.

The media is in charge of what you think. They're in charge of what you know and don't know. And any challenge to that, like alternative media or a president with direct access to the audience and doesn't need them, is a threat.

I don't know if Mika Brzezinski intended to be that honest. She's very worried the president intimidating the media is gonna lead to people believing what the president says instead of what the media says, and it's the media's job to control what people think. She used the word "control." She worries that Donald Trump is acing them on this and her fear is rational, but her philosophy is off course, all wet.

The media is terribly worried that Donald Trump is going to influence people. The media will tell you, I mean, crazy Mika, Ms. Brzezinski, actually said that she worries that Trump may actually end up controlling what people think on jobs and the economy. And it's not the president's job, it's the media's job to tell people, to determine people exactly what they think.

Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own, and control the corporations. They've long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.

It's phenomenal the kind of support Donald Trump has, despite the best efforts to suppress it, and those efforts are being made, I think it's profound, the number of people.

Chinese central government doesn't need to even lead public opinion: it just selectively stops censorship. In other words, just as censorship is a political tool, so is the absence of censorship.

The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play.

Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and colored and put into cans.