MEDIA AND PROPAGANDA
Liberal friendly quotes:
"Its failings notwithstanding, there is much to be said
in favor of journalism in that by giving us the opinion of the
uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the
community."
-- Oscar Wilde
"I am personally acquainted with hundreds of journalists,
and the opinion of the majority of them would not be worth tuppence
in private, but when they speak in print it is the newspaper that
is talking (the pygmy scribe is not visible) and then their utterances
shake the community like the thunders of prophecy."
-- Mark Twain, speech, 2/1873
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.
Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted
vehicle... Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in
some such way as this. Divide his paper into four chapters,
heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities.
4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short."
-- Thomas Jefferson, 1807
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own
one."
-- A.J. Liebling, "Do You Belong in Journalism?" The
New Yorker, May 14, 1960
"By 1990, publishers of mass circulation daily newspapers
will finally stop kidding themselves that they are in the newspaper
business and admit that they are primarily in the business of
carrying advertising messages."
-- A. Roy Megary, publisher, Toronto Globe and Mail
And from the other side...
"Puff Graham."
-- William Randolph Hearst, in a telegram ordering all Hearst editors to
promote the fiercely anti-communist preacher Billy Graham in newspapers,
magazines, newsreels and movies. Within two months, the obscure Graham
was preaching to crowds of 350,000.
"The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their
intelligence small, but their power of forgetting is enormous.
In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be
limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans
until the last member of the public understands..."
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 180-181.
"In political matters feeling often decides more correctly than reason."
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 173
"All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level
must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those
it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended
to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to
be."
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 180
"But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield
no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly
and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few
points and repeat them over and over."
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 184
"It is a mistake to make propaganda many-sided, like scientific
instruction, for instance... As soon as you sacrifice this slogan
and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the
crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered."
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 180-181
"[Propaganda] must be aimed at the emotions and only to a
very limited degree at the so-called intellect... The art of propaganda
lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses
and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to
the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses."
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 180
"[Propaganda] does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive
and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never
half this way and half that way
"
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 183
"[This is the] very first condition which has to be fulfilled
in every kind of propaganda: a systematically one-sided attitude
towards every problem that has to be dealt with
"
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 182
"The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively
it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more
effective [propaganda] will be."
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 180
"For I must not measure the speech of a statesman to his
people by the impression which it leaves in a university professor,
but by the effect it exerts on the people. And this alone gives
the standard for the speaker's genius."
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 477
"The purpose of propaganda is not to provide interesting
distraction for blasé young gentlemen, but to convince
the masses. But the masses are slow moving, and they always require
a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and
only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times
will the masses finally remember them."
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 185
"When there is change, it must not alter the content of what
propaganda is driving at, but in the end must always say the same
thing. For instance, a slogan must be presented from different
angles, but the end of all remarks must always and immutably be
the slogan itself. Only in this way can the propaganda have a
unified and complete effect."
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 185
"To whom should propaganda be addressed? To the scientifically
trained intelligentsia or the less educated masses? It must be
addressed always and exclusively to the masses."
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 179
"As soon as one point is removed from the sphere of dogmatic
certainty, the discussion may not simply result in a new and better
formulation, but may easily lead to endless debates and general
confusion."
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
"The grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind
it, even after it has been nailed down."
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
"I have already stated
that all great, world-shaking
events have been brought about, not by written matter, but by
the spoken word
While the speaker gets a continuous correction
of his speech from the crowd he is addressing, since he can always
see in the faces of his listeners to what they extent they follow
his arguments with understanding and whether the impression and
the effect of his words lead to the desired goal -- the writer
does not know his readers at all. The essential point
is
that a piece of literature never knows into what hands it will
fall, and yet must retain its definite form."
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 469-70
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