Mainstream media

Mainstream media (MSM) is a term and abbreviation used to refer collectively to the various large mass news media that influence many people, and both reflect and shape prevailing currents of thought. The term is used to contrast with alternative media which can often present opinions, views or dissent from various stances.

Quotes

 * Sorted alphabetically by author or source


 * As mainstream news outlets become increasingly complacent, and even supportive of pro-war policies, it becomes more essential that anti-war voices, and anti-war journalists in particular, resist the attempt by the United States to set the precedent that the act of publishing war crimes is a punishable offense.
 * Sam Carliner, in Fate Of Anti-War Journalism Lies in Upcoming Assange Hearings (22 October 2021)


 * If Wikileaks were a print publication, the injunction would be unthinkable. … What distinguishes this case is that the allegedly intolerable materials were published on the Internet instead of on paper. But that's a poor reason to abandon the principles that protect those who want to publish -- as well as those who want to read. Censorship is censorship, no matter the medium.


 * We welcome everyone here to the hearing. In the Texas v. Johnson case in 1989, the Supreme Court set forth one  of the fundamental principles of our democracy. That is, that  if there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or  disagreeable. That was Justice William Brennan.
 * Congressman John Conyers in U.S. Congress House Hearing: Espionage Act and the Legal and Constitutional Issue Raised by Wikileaks. Hearing Before the Committee on the Judiciary House of Representatives, One Hundred Eleventh Congress, Second Session, (16 December 2010).  C-SPAN recording


 * Media establishments inside Russia have been shut down for refusing to report only government-approved, highly deceptive versions of events in Ukraine. Western outlets such as the BBC have left the country. Anyone who passes on information that contradicts official sources now faces up to 15 years in jail'''; the new law prompted the Chinese-owned platform TikTok to suspend operations. Kremlin authorities have blocked access to Facebook and Twitter.
 * Cynthia Hooper, in "Russia’s information war: painful truths vs. comfortable lies" in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (9 March 2022)


 * Russians might not believe official media, but might also choose — perhaps subconsciously — not to acknowledge the extent to which they allow themselves to be deceived. (It bears mentioning that social media analysts of the 2016 US presidential election noted a similar phenomenon: Citizens can, and often do, choose to believe comfortable falsehoods, instead of admitting to truths that disrupt their desired way of seeing the world.) Looking at Russian television news after the takeover of Crimea in 2014, journalist Maria Lipman concluded that the more extreme and far-fetched the claims of various programs became, the more their audiences grew. “Russian viewers tuned into shows,” she and two colleagues argued in a 2018 essay, “in search of not truth, but emotional gratification.” Viewers wanted to believe wildly distorted media stories that affirmed “national pride and a sense of vindication.”
 * Cynthia Hooper, in "Russia’s information war: painful truths vs. comfortable lies" by Cynthia Hooper, in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (9 March 2022)


 * It’s as silly to blame social media for causing fake news as it would be to blame the internal combustion engine for causing road rage... The mass-market tabloid press fomented the Spanish-American War on dubious pretexts in 1898, and from this point on, powerful media corporations, driven to boost profits by fanning the resentments of people who’ve been abused, have sold them stimulants, palliatives, and escapes that undermine the strengths that republican freedom requires.
 * Jim Sleeper in "Don't Blame Social Media for Fake News. The Mainstream Media Got There First," Newsweek (11 September 2017)


 * The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.
 * Malcolm X, in Jawara D. King The Awakening of Global Consciousness: A Guide to Self-Realization and ..., AuthorHouse, 26 July 2010, p. 199
 * Many journalists become very defensive when you suggest to them that they are anything but impartial and objective. The problem with those words 'impartiality' and 'objectivity' is that they have lost their dictionary meaning. They've been taken over... [they] now mean the establishment point of view... Journalists don't sit down and think, 'I'm now going to speak for the establishment.' Of course not. But they internalise a whole set of assumptions, and one of the most potent assumptions is that the world should be seen in terms of its usefulness to the West, not humanity.
 * John Pilger, The Progressive, Interview with John Pilger, November 2002



If you aren't careful, because I've seen some of you caught in that bag, you run away hating yourself and loving the man — while you're catching hell from the man. You let the man maneuver you into thinking that it's wrong to fight him when he's fighting you. He's fighting you in the morning, fighting you in the noon, fighting you at night and fighting you all in between, and you still think it's wrong to fight him back. Why? The press. The newspapers make you look wrong.
 * The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he's a the victim and make the victim look like he's the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press. It will make the criminal look like he's the victim and make the victim look like he's the criminal. 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, Speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem (13 December 1964), later published in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (1965), edited by George Breitman, p. 93


 * A western citizen is being brainwashed much more than a soviet citizen ever was during the era of communist propaganda. In ideology, the main thing is not the ideas, but rather the mechanisms of their distribution. The might of the Western media, for example, is incomparably greater than that of the propaganda mechanisms of the Vatican when it was at the zenith of its power. And it is not only the cinema, literature, philosophy – all the levers of influence and mechanisms used in the promulgation of culture, in its broadest sense, work in this direction. At the slightest impulse all who work in this area respond with such consistency that it is hard not to think that all orders come from a single source of power.
 * Aleksandr Zinovyev, as quoted in Alexander Zinoviev on Stalin and the dissolution of the USSR, October 27, 2016