Media Monopoly Quotes

All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake “public opinion” for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.

When one millionaire has ten newspapers and ten million people have no newspapers—that is not freedom of the press.

The media, famously called the marketplace of ideas, is a failed market when a strong interest faces no like interest to generate competing ideas.

A city with one newspaper... is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.

I really am convinced that what is happening in media today is the result of the birth of conservative media and its rapid growth and ascension. It has destroyed the left's monopoly in media. When they had the monopoly, they could pretend that they were not what they are and get away with it. They could pretend to be objective. You know, the power of a monopoly is not just determining what stories you are going to cover, but what you don't cover is just as powerful.

Television enjoys a de facto monopoly on what goes into the heads of a significant part of the population and what they think.

USA belongs to a handful of men who also control the media. Look at General Electric. It produces nuclear weapons for the Pentagon and also owns the NBC News cable channel, which is a very sophisticated censure apparatus, intrinsic to the system. It's genius. It's like an electronic cage around the nation which blocks information from getting through.

It's no secret that the media has fragmented in recent years, that audiences have been cut into slivers, and that more and more people get their news from ever narrower outlets.

When the media had their monopoly and they determined what was news and what wasn't news and when they determined what commentary the news was, that's all it was. But my show came along in 1988 and blew up that monopoly.

The media have disproportionate control of the information in our society.

The world is such a big place, and there's so much that goes on, but a lot of the media really just cover the same thing over and over again.

For most of the Latinos in our nation, merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable would mean one company controlling their window to the world of culture and entertainment.

It would be a shame if the BBC didn't exist.

A city with one newspaper, or with a morning and an evening paper under one ownership, is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.

As far as the media is concerned, they ought to hate me. Before I came along, they had a monopoly. Before I came along, nationally all there was, was the three networks, the big newspapers, and CNN. When I started in '88, that was it. And now look. That monopoly they had is gone. Now there is Fox News, from 1996. That was nine years after I started. You got all kinds of conservative talk radio out there now. And that's done nothing but grow. I have not lost a single listener because of all the other shows. We've grown the pie, so to speak.

A political party is dying before our eyes-and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the mainstream media, which is being destroyed by the opposition.

If a man, for private profit, tears at the public news, does so with the impatience of one who thinks he actually owns the news you get, it is against the national interest.

One of the anomalies of digital journalism is a lack of clarity between high and low. That's the historic distinction in publishing, mass from class, the vulgar from the refined, tabloid from broadsheet, the penny press from papers costing a nickel.

We are developing a media policy which would be about breaking up single ownership of too many sources of information so that we have a multiplicity of sources.

The media is controlled.

The problem that we've had is four media companies run media, globally. And some say they're on the Right and some say they're on the Left; look, they're all afraid of losing Ford as a client. So they're all, by definition, huge companies that are going to be inherently conservative.

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

Hollywood used to control the distribution; now Silicon Valley does.

My worry about the New York Times is that it's got the only position as a national elitist general-interest paper. So the network news picks up its cues from the Times. And local papers do too. It has a huge influence. And we'd love to challenge it.

Common sense tells us that this explosion of media sources should eliminate any concern over a lack of diversity of views in the marketplace and competition.