Serge Lang Quotes

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

Of all newspaper presses, I never heard anyone deny that the American is the worst.... [N]othing is easier than to make the people know only one side of a question; few things are easier than to keep them altogether from the knowledge of any particular affair; and, worse than all, on them [the American people] may easily be practiced the discovery that lies may work their intended effect, before the truth can overtake them. It is hard to tell which is worse; the wide diffusion of things that are not true or the suppression of things that are.

I just think that the media is just making things up. I don't really pay attention.

In politics, a lie unanswered becomes truth within 24 hours.

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

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

False stories can be promulgated more easily when the people trying to tell true stories have been discredited - or when they are battered by rubber bullets.

Donald Trump really understood how to float a story, how to float a rumor, how to manipulate the truth.

There are things that go public, and everything that comes out is not the truth.

If we are not serious about facts and what's true and what's not. And particularly in an age of social media where so many people are getting their information in sound bites and snippets off their phones, if we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.

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.

One of the dangers today is that when we don't like what the facts tell us, we just attack the facts, and we undermine the credibility of institutions. That is true not just for reporting; it's true of when people are attacking the congressional budget office, or when they're attacking certain science - that's where we can get into a dangerous realm.

Russia is all fake news. It's all fake news. The nice thing is, I see it starting to turn, where people are now looking at the illegal - I think it's very important - the illegal, giving out classified information. It was - and let me just tell you, it was given out like so much.

Fake news has been around as long as news has been around.

I created hoaxes. I confronted and challenged the majority opinion. I attacked, humiliated, and criticized the voice of the corporate mainstream media.

Hitler and Joseph Goebbels understood that if you say something loud and long enough many people will believe it. A good journalist's first priority should be to separate propaganda from fact - but sometimes its very hard to do that.

I do not trust self serving misinformation coming from corporations and their media trolls. I do not trust politicians who are taking millions from those corporations either. I trust people. So I make my music for people not for candidates.

It takes two things to make a political lie work: a powerful person or institution willing to utter it, and another set of powerful institutions to amplify it.

In these days of widespread illiteracy, functional illiteracy... anything that keeps people stupid is a felony.

If the people that believed the moon landing was staged on a movie lot had access to unlimited money from large carbon polluters or some other special interest who wanted to confuse people into thinking that the moon landing didn't take place, I'm sure we'd have a robust debate about it right now.

You have all these people in the press who are ringing their hands over fake news stories. That actually became the narratives for critics.

If deliberate distortion of reality by corporate media could be effectively prosecuted in the United States, the entire industry would be behind bars.

I called the fake news "the enemy of the people" - and they are. They are the enemy of the people. Because they have no sources, they just make them up when there are none.

In a social media age, it seems that everyone lives in their own reality and that when you give consideration to Newt Gingrich, he exists in an alternate reality, at some level, where the things he says are so diametrically opposed to the record.

They are evil people, the press, the media, they are bad people, and nobody, nobody lies like they do. I never like it when they tell me that, and I'm sure they're right, but when people say things that are fabrication - you know, there were fabricated stories made up, these were fabrications. Out of nowhere.