Bert Lance Quotes

Bad stories are written about me because the press knows they can make me into a weeping dog and few people will object.

I don't believe what the papers are saying They're just out to capture my dime, Exaggerating this, exaggerating that.

While they shriek for "freedom of the press" when there is no slightest threat to that freedom, they deny to citizens that freedom from the press to which the decencies of life entitle them. They misrepresent, they distort, they color, they blackguard, they lie.

The listeners can see through our manipulation of the news too clearly. It is all laid on too thickly.

The problem with smear campaigns is that too often they work

What you say about the newspapers is very true ... They are indeed a curious compound of truth and untruth. I am so used to newspaper nonsense and attacks that I do not mind it in the least....

I operate on the principle that the mass media will never be accurate. They never have been. When did yellow journalism begin? After all, their basic principle is, simplify and exaggerate.

Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.

It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.

The media lies to us all the time, and we always believe the media.

Fair and balanced is doublespeak for bite-out-chunks-of-truth until only irrelevancy is left, byte-sized, entertaining irrelevancy

Those bastards [the press] can rip a single page out of the Bible, and if they play it right, they can make Jesus Christ sound like the devil.

When you're in the middle of a rumor storm, your two choices are not very good .... And there are some Americans who will believe that where there's smoke there's fire.

Whenever you read a spy story in the press, you know you are being spun.

The administration shaded the truth … I was part of the propaganda campaign.

There is no lie too improbable, no distortion too great, no smear campaign too dirty for the State Department and the media to embrace.

I have a saddened and weakening attitude toward the media and press.

I believe most media is filtered and fake.

You should never trust anything reported by the media. Their first priority is to spread propaganda; their second priority is to make money. They never really care if they tell the truth or not.

There's so much in the media that's not the truth.

People see whatever the media first reports.

You know, the media always tries to twist things and make things into what they're not.

The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even to murder, with the truth.

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.