Media Plurality Quotes

It’s a lot easier and cheaper to have thumbsuckers and pundits on television than it is to have reporters and news bureaus around the world.

I don't want to romanticize the world in which everybody watched three networks and the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were incredibly dominant. That time has passed.

I'm worried about the traditional media, but I think the new media is a plus for democracy.

I would like Leveson Part Two. I think Leveson was a good exercise. That is why the Tories blocked it, because it was beginning to develop more accountability within the media itself.

There is no more important struggle for American democracy than ensuring a diverse, independent and free media. Free Press is at the heart of that struggle.

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.

We have got to nurture the spirit of independent journalism in this country, or we'll not save capitalism from its own excesses, and we'll not save democracy from its own inertia.

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.

Fox News is no monopoly. It is a singular minority in a sea of liberal media. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC vs. Fox. The lineup is so unbalanced as to be comical - and that doesn't even include the other commanding heights of the culture that are firmly, flagrantly liberal: Hollywood, the foundations, the universities, the elite newspapers.

“If the United States…can pass laws to block media cross ownership within one market to protect the diversity of voices, then we in Canada must ask ourselves why we do not seem to attach the same importance to that important principle.

I don't even read 'the Sun' and it's my job to read everything that's politically important. I think that's a symbol of the declining power of the mainstream media.

We think we have got freedom of the press. When one millionaire has ten newspapers and ten million people have no newspapers - that is not freedom of the press.

The press in America has never been stronger and never been freer and never been more vibrant, sometimes to my chagrin, and a lot of times to my delight.

To be honest with you, I worry about concentration of ownership in media, where you have a handful of media conglomerates largely controlling what we see, hear and read.

Well, many of us believe that excessive media concentration is a subject that ought to be addressed, and it is, of course, the intention of the majority party not to allow that to be discussed.

Without the BBC, the proliferation of television and radio channels by the private sector would simply result in more and more channels, with tiny audiences, all seeking to do the same thing. The future would be one of fragmentation - fragmentation without either plurality or diversity.

The biggest improvement in the flow of information in America in our lifetimes is that no single group controls the news anymore.

While there continue to be critics of the Comcast-NBC merger, it's hard to argue that competition in news and entertainment has diminished as a result, given the rise of Netflix and Amazon and the explosion in entertainment options that followed the merger.

One of the problems with any kind of talking about the media landscape is that we've just been through an unusually stable period in which, for fifty years, English language media was centered in three cities - London, New York, and Los Angeles - around a very stable group of people working in a relatively stable set of media.

I really do think we're going through a period of concentration of ownership of media, and we're starting to see the effects at the editorial level, and it's all bad. This increased pressure for profits every quarter, smaller news hole, less coverage of important stuff - the extent that it's become one giant infotainment industry.

I have never quite grasped the worry about the power of the press. After all, it speaks with a thousand voices, in constant dissonance.

There is no independent American print or TV media.

It's not about 'NBC is evil.' It's about that media structure - CBS, ABC, CNN, even some of the smaller operations are now multinationals, with these extraordinarily diverse holdings.

The media is too concentrated, too few people own too much. There's really five companies that control 90 percent of what we read, see and hear. It's not healthy.

We print journalists are victims of economic forces beyond our control. We were as surprised as everyone else was by the sudden collapse of the reliable reporting market. We had no idea that real news and clear-eyed analysis were being 'bundled' with subprime celebrity gossip, 'U.S. Weekly' derivatives, and Jennifer Aniston/Angelina Jolie swaps.