Karl Kraus Quotes

People get their information in different ways now. And we are a little poorer for it, because the way you get information affects what you learn.

We are not the "free thinkers" we think we are. What we eat unavoidably impacts our physiology; the information we consume inevitably affects our opinions and perspectives. You cannot eat junk food with impunity; you cannot consume information without consequences.

I don't think anyone in the media thinks strategically about society.

People think they're getting objective information, but they're not. They're getting news wrapped up in opinion.

TV has taken reflection out of the human condition. People didn't use to have a ready answer for everything, whether they knew something about it or not. People think they have to have an answer for everything because the guys on TV have an answer for everything.

The Information Highway intrigues me because I have always been a newshound; I have always been curious about why people believe what they believe.

All television is educational television. The question is: what is it teaching?

The great threat to the young and pure in heart is not what they read but what they don't read.

Today's audience knows more about what's on television than what's in life.

Television is apparently the enemy of nuance. But nuance is essential for a thoughtful discussion.

The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.

The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves - and the better the teacher, the better the student body.

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

The truthiness is, anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news 'at' you.

In the old days, there were three networks, and all of a sudden, Walter Cronkite is the most trusted man in America. Everybody believes what he says, not even thinking. In those days, we didn't even know it was being spun. We were very willing to just listen to it and go along with.

The media, and how we're taught to read it, has a huge impact on who we become as people.

There's so much to consume that it's very easy to read a headline in the news outlets that you subscribe to that you maybe support and go 'This is how I feel.'

We, as a culture, use television as at least one of the great arbiters of truth. Even though we know it's fiction, when we see it portrayed, we believe it. We recognize it as part of our culture.

I do feel like the media is one of the biggest problems. If you look at all these rolling news channels, they sensationalize the story, they focus on gossip, and they don't actually tell the full story.

I actually think we should be trying to be rigorous in our thinking about television and the way it enters our lives and shapes the way so many people think.

If you watch a news channel, you wouldn't then say that that person who's watching the news channel thinks everything that the news channel puts out. You wouldn't think that.

I know journalists like to think that they are read by people like me, but I don't read them.

We're in a dangerous phase right now where too many millions of Americans aren't listening at all to what the press tells them, and that concerns me.

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.

I just think we as consumers of information media must be very clear what it is we are consuming. Whether we are choosing to get our information by listening to people fight about it. Or whether we're choosing to get it by listening to the facts or watching the facts as they're laid out and then reaching our own conclusions. It's very different ways of info gathering, but it's not all journalism.