Quotes / Old Media Are Evil

Film — Live-Action

"If the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough."

—Citizen Kane

Peter Parker: Spider-Man wasn't trying to attack the city, he was trying to SAVE it! That's slander!
J. Jonah Jameson: It is not. I resent that. Slander is spoken. In print, it's libel.

— Spider-Man

"The news is a sacred temple. And you are part of the cabal that's ruining with horseshit!"

—Craig Pomeroy, Morning Glory

"Well, if you want to try and turn this into some anti-war protest, expect to hear your "Mountain of Conflict" soundbite everywhere: from ringtones to a fucking dance mix on YouTube. And I will marshal all the media forces of darkness to hound you to an assisted suicide."

—Malcolm Tucker, In the Loop

"We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal! You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube! You eat like the tube! You raise your children like the tube! You even think like the tube! This is mass madness. You maniacs. In God's name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion!"

—Howard Beale, Network

Live-Action TV

"If people wanted to be 'challenged', then they wouldn't be reading us, would they? What people want to see is their opinions, but typed. Not just in crayon."

—Danny, The Tunnel

Sheridan: You didn't come here to do an objective story.
Dan Randall, ISN: There's no such thing. The objective journalist is one of those great myths you read about, like a griffin or a phoenix or an honest politician.

—Babylon 5, "The Illusion of Truth"

Music

We talk and talk until my head explodes
I turn on the news and my body froze
The braying sheep on my TV screen
Make this boy shout, make this boy scream!

—The Jam, "Going Underground"

I make my living off the evening news
Just give me something
Something I can use
People love it when you lose
They love dirty laundry
Well, I coulda been an actor, but I wound up here
I just have to look good, I don't have to be clear
Come and whisper in my ear
Give us dirty laundry
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down

—Don Henley, "Dirty Laundry"

And when you trust your television
What you get is what you got
Cause when they own the information, oh
They can bend it all they want

—John Mayer, "Waiting On The World To Change"

Newspaper Comics

"Oh greatest of the mass media, thank you for elevating emotion, reducing thought, and stifling imagination. Thank you for the artificiality of quick solutions and the insidious manipulation of human desires for commercial purposes. This bowl of lukewarm tapioca represents my brain. I offer it in humble sacrifice. Bestow thy flickering light forever."

—Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes

Stand-Up Comedy

"You know what a fake news show on Fox News should give you? Real news."

—Lewis Black

"...they're filling their pages with the sort of extreme content normally associated with sicko websites aimed at snickering frat boys - grisly real-life murder stories, close-up photos of tumours and injuries, that kind of thing - the only real difference being that here the relentless horror is interspersed with heart-warming readers' letters in which Kids Say the Funniest Things. Somehow the juxtaposition only makes the nasty content seem worse."

—Charlie Brooker on British tabloids

Web Original

"Cronkite?! Jesus, kid! Cronkite only covered the Watergate scandal to help sell burglar alarms to liberals!"

— Onion News Empire

Estevez invited the writer to hang out with him, Judd Nelson and Rob Lowe one night at the Hard Rock Cafe. After watching the young actors party, Blum decided to change the focus of his article... Previously, they had been viewed as talented performers who would go on to have long careers. But after Blum’s article, they were viewed as a bunch of frat boys.

—LeBeau, "What the Hell Happened to Ally Sheedy?"

I went to the opening game against the Cardinals in 1999. One of the local television stations had a camera planted right by me, my best friend and my dad. The Eagles played great in the first half and the cameraman caught us screaming, cheering, and jumping up and down like 10 times. We raced home and set our VCR to tape the evening local news. It was a pretty exciting moment for me as an 11 year old.

It turns out the whole story was about the new drunk tank and the very honorable Judge Seamus McCaffery. It was soul crushing. The only clip they used was my dad cheering after a touchdown with the Voice of God ominously pointing out that "WILD FANS…AND ALCOHOL…"

—Deadspin, "Why Your Team Sucks 2014: Philadelphia Eagles"

He accused newly out-of-the-closet NBA player Jason Collins of covering up a prior engagement to a woman, even though Collins had clearly noted it in the very same first-person article that announced his homosexuality. Kurtz was subsequently fired by the Daily Beast (is there anyone they didn't fire this year?) for "serial inaccuracy" and then moved over to Fox News, because of course they hired him. Before he'd finished unpacking, Kurtz posted a 500-word ogling of Ben Bradlee's daughter-in-law's Facebook page ("Her new profile picture, in a Swiss-cheese bra that leaves little to the imagination...is so revealing that it drew a torrent of breathless comments"). Keep in mind that Kurtz claims to be a media watchdog. Apparently we now need a watchdog to watch our watchdogs.

—Drew Magary on Howard Kurtz

Of the major networks, CNN and MSNBC are slightly better... However, these networks all still court the same advertisers, and largely the same agenda where war is a force for peace, capitalism is king, and the poor are invisible. Fox News just has more ads for gold, which makes some sense, we admit, since poor people can’t afford gold.

—Jamie Kilstein and Allison Kilkenny, "The Day Jon Stewart Quit"

The anchor framed this particular fuck-up as anomalous, but a barrage of new reports suggest exactly the opposite: That even his apology is tainted with misinformation.

—J.K. Trotter on Brian Williams

Web Video

"A couple years ago, there was a story about killer foxes in London...Now, a couple of years ago, we went to his house as he was in his declining years. We went there in the summer, and all of the windows were bolted shut, and the house was absolutely boiling hot. And we said, 'Grandad, why don't you have the windows open?! We're boiling in here.' And he didn't want to, because he was afraid that the foxes would get in and attack him.''

—Martin Robbins, "Why the Daily Mail is Evil"

Real Life

No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges — absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won't be living their own lives any more.

— Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End (1953).

I seldom watch television. But when I do set out to twirl the dial, it is usually on Sunday, when our corporate rulers address us from their cathode pulpit. Seedy Washington journalists, sharp-eyed government officials who could not dispose of a brand-new car in Spokane, think-tank employees, etiolated from too long residence 'neath flat rocks, and always, always Henry Kissinger, whose destruction of so many Asians and their once-charming real estate won him a prize for peace from the ironists of northern Europe. The level of the chat on these programmes is about as low as it is possible to get without actually serving the viewers gin.

—Gore Vidal

You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to.

—Humbert Wolfe

"If you aren't careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing."

— Malcolm X, December 13, 1964

"By the time you’ve made it to Bureau Chief, or Editor, or you’ve become a bigshot at CBS or something, the chances are that you’ve just got all this stuff in your bones – you’ve internalized the values that make it clear to you that there are certain things you just don’t say, and in fact, you don’t even think them anymore...If you're a young journalist and you're pursuing stories that people at the managerial level know, either intuitively or explicitly, are not to be pursued, you can be sent off to work at the police desk, and advised that you don't have 'proper standards or objectivity.'"

—Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power

It was OK with me that she didn't like the film, and it didn't bother me that she didn't like the point I was making, or even how I was making it. What was so incredibly appalling and shocking is how she printed outright lies about my movie. I had never experienced such a brazen, bald-faced barrage of disinformation. She tried to rewrite history... Her complete fabrication of the facts was so weird, so out there, so obviously made-up, that my first response was this must be a humor piece she had written.

—Michael Moore on Pauline Kael

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