A Quote by Neil Postman

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

Neil Postman

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Neil Postman
American - Author
March 8, 1931 - October 5, 2003

Voting is the next-to-last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge, of course, is giving your opinion to a pollster.

Neil Postman

I'm confused about who the news belongs to. I always have it in my head that if your name's in the news, then the news should be paying you. Because it's your news and they're taking it and selling it as their product. ...If people didn't give the news their news, and if everybody kept their news to themselves, the news wouldn't have any news.

Andy Warhol

The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions - whenever asked - cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. Information will never replace illumination.

Susan Sontag

You turn on the news, there're no facts anymore. 'Here's what's happening today,' and then you cut to thirty minutes of people in little boxes, little windows, telling you their opinions on it. It seems like all the news is going on in the ticker-tape on the bottom of the news. It's all opinion, it's all editorial.

Derek Cianfrance

The New York Times distorts and defrauds the news and then claims to be impartial. They never give an even-handed version of the news - that's the last thing they'd ever do.

Jackie Mason

When the newspapers have got nothing else to talk about, they cut loose on the young. The young are always news. If they are up to something, that's news. If they aren't, that's news too.

Kenneth Rexroth

I got an idea: people like news why don't we write the news down on a piece of paper, and we'll gas them up and drive them to everyone's house. I mean, if you were going to say that now, it doesn't sound like a great idea, because there are other ways you can distribute the news.

Biz Stone

The news might be single-handedly trying to bring about an environmental catastrophe, which it will then report on. Super injunctions are interesting legal weapons really, they don't just gag the press, they gag them from mentioning the existence of the gag. Sport belongs in a news bulletin about as much as a mummified cat's head belongs in a Caesar salad. Combine the "mounting pressure" with the "growing cause" and you've got yourself a "media whirlwind" which you can also refer to.

Charlie Brooker

Accusations against gay schoolteachers figure really prominently in liberal news headlines, because they're attention-grabbing and ratings-getting. They last a news cycle and go away and then you never hear about them again.

Paul Marcarelli

I just don't need cable news. There's nothing that happens on cable news that I don't already know. I'm talking about just the acquisition of information, learning things. What is on cable TV is not that. Cable news isn't news. What is happening on cable news right now is a political assassination of not just Donald Trump, but of ideas and cultural mores that I believe in.

Rush Limbaugh

People say to me all the time, "I get my news from your show." And that isn't the way they should get their news. But the choice is not between getting their news the right way and getting their news from my show. The choice is that they won't get any at all unless you give it to them in an entertaining package.

Bill Maher

Comedy makes everything accessible. Watching the news is kind of like being fed your evening pill. What's fun about it? Nothing. And so if you can get news and information about things going on in the world through a comic platform, everything's going to connect.

Dan Aykroyd

The News-writer lies down at Night in great Tranquillity, upon a piece of News which corrupts before Morning, and which he is obliged to throw away as soon as he awakes.

Jean de la Bruyere

The weakness of cable news is that it chases its audience around. Your audience wants fast-paced, popular news. It needs real news. Cable news changes its stripes based on audience reaction. Viewers are reacting well to breaking news? You probably do more breaking news than you need to. The struggle is building something so that people will come to you, as opposed to constantly changing what you are because you're unsure of where the audience is.

Ali Velshi

Now your kids can't escape. Thirteen-year-olds back then, if they didn't watch the evening news, they didn't see news. If they didn't watch the 6:30 or seven p.m. news, they didn't see news. Today younger people have much more access to that kind of hard news than you did when you were 13 back then.

Rush Limbaugh

Another effect of news articles is that the events, however frightening, can thus be consigned to the box of things that happen to other people, not us, and that we are doing things to bring them under control. This is the diet we're fed all the time, so we acculturate to it. And news must, in turn, follow the form to which we - our bodies - are accustomed: describe the event, incite the fear, then say how it's being addressed, how the herd's alpha males are dealing with it.

Zia Haider Rahman

A Quote by Neil Postman

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