The polls are just being used as another tool of voter suppression. The polls are an attempt to not reflect public opinion, but to shape it. Yours. They want to depress the heck out of you.
The Press, which is mostly controlled by vested interests, has an excessive influence on public opinion.
Rhetoric, which is the use of language to inform or persuade, is very important in shaping public opinion. We are very easily fooled by language and how it is used by others.
Pre-poll and exit polls have now become a commercial proposition. No longer are they viewed as means for a debate or means for enriching the voters and improving the quality of political campaigns. They have become yet another way of manipulation.
Men get opinions as boys learn to spell, by reiteration chiefly.
When you control opinion, as corporate America controls opinion in the United States by owning the media, you can make the masses believe almost anything you want, and guide them as you please.
Acting upon everybody for 30 minutes in 24 hours, the press is asked to create a mystical force called Public Opinion that will take up the slack in public institutions. The press has often mistakenly pretended that it could do just that.
The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the 'engineering of consent' by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays.
Film is one small voice in a great cacophony of noise from newspapers, from the television, from social media, so it can have a little dent, you know? It can help to create a climate of opinion.
Journalism has a distinct place in familiarizing and expressing public opinion.
Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and colored and put into cans.
I'll be the first to admit when I'm influenced by something.
I have no interest in trying to manipulate people's emotions or opinions.
Opinion elites begin to shape a debate.
It is not at all clear how much the media influences public opinion and how much public opinion influences the media.
People have their own opinions but sometimes with the media things get chopped up and cut around to make stories out of it.
Power's footstool is opinion and his throne the human heart.
Everyone endeavors as much as possible to make others love what he loves, and to hate what he hates... This effort to make everyone approve what we love or hate is in truth ambition, and so we see that each person by nature desires that other persons should live according to his way of thinking.
As the capacity to coerce declines, it is natural to turn to control of opinion as the basis for authority and domination - a fundamental principle of government already emphasized by David Hume.
Business leaders shape public opinion.
Companies should take advantage of social media's power to connect, but honor the continued role of media in shaping opinion.
Public opinion can be influential, the media can be influential.
When a large number of organs of the press come to advance along the same track, their influence becomes almost irresistible in the long term, and public opinion, struck always from the same side, ends by yielding under their blows.
Arab media is market driven like the American media. It does not so much shape public opinion as much as it reflects it.
Music does affect your opinions. Plato is supposed to have said "It's very dangerous to allow the wrong kind of music into the republic."
