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Surely one of the most visible lessons taught by the twentieth century has been the existence, not so much of a number of different realities, but of a number of different lenses with which to see the same reality.

— Michael Arlen, "Some Notes on Television Criticism," The View from Highway One, p. 9.


Television is a new, hard test of our wisdom. If we succeed in mastering the new medium it will enrich us. But it can also put our minds to sleep. We must not forget that in the past the inability to transport immediate experience and to convey it to others made the use of language necessary and thus compelled the human mind to develop concepts. For in order to describe things, one must draw the general from the specific; one must select, compare, think. When communication can be achieved by pointing with the finger, however, the mouth grows silent, the writing hand stops, and the mind shrinks.

— Rudolf Arnheim

We believe that there is a clear need for a national Center for Media Study, independent of both media and government, and responsible to the people...the recurring conflict between media commercial interest and the public interest distorts both the performance of the media and their capacity for self-evaluation and self-criticism."

— R.K. Baker & S.J. Ball, Mass Media and Violence Vol. XI: A Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, 1969


My spiritual gift, my specific calling from God, is to be a television talk show host.

— Jim Bakker, quoted in Bennett, D., The Party of Fear, p.380.


Television...does not so much enhance literacy as render it irrelevant bypassing the black and white of the word to bring a bright color world of pictures to Everyman...

— Benjamin R. Barber, A Passion for Democracy, p. 273.


What distinguishes the New Right from other American reactionary movements and what it shares with the early phase of German fascism, is its incorporation of conservative impulses into a system of representation consisting largely of media techniques and media images.

— Philip Bishop, Madison Social Text Group, "The New Right and the Media" Social Text 1:1 (Winter 1979): p. 178.


As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.

— Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image (1961) p. 257.

The communications media in America carry on an enterprise more fundamental even than formal education to the well being of an open society.

— Douglass Cater, 1971


You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal...In God's name, you people are the real thing; we're the illusion.

— Howard Beale, character in Paddy Chayevski's film, Network


We must come to understand the extent to which lenses shape, filter, and otherwise alter the data which passes through them the extreme degree to which the lens itself informs our information. This influence, though radical in many cases, often manifests itself subtly. Yet even the most blatant distortions tend to be taken for granted as a result of the enduring cultural confidence in the essential trustworthiness and impartiality of what is in fact a technology resonant with cultural bias and highly susceptible to manipulation.

— A.D. Coleman, Lentil Soup, Et cetera B. 42:1 (Spring 1985): p. 30.

It seems to me that what makes a tool into a determining aspect of the culture in which it functions is not merely its presence, but two additional aspects. One of these is its integration into conceptual assumptions of that culture, which in turn makes it possible to think about that tool in its relation to culture. The second, a corollary of the first, is the derivation from that tool of understandings which become fundamental to that culture's world view.

— A.D. Coleman, ibid., p. 22.


The compact with Americans that is implicit in the right to operate a protected monopoly over the public airwaves is being shattered. No longer are great issues of American life being discussed in any meaningful way over the commercial broadcast networks.

— John Dancy, "Lights in a Box: Gotcha Journalism and Public Policy," Harvard International Review of Press/Politics 2:4, Fall 1997, p. 107.


There is a simple truism about television: the eye always predominates over the ear when there is a fundamental clash between the two.

— Sam Donaldson


The two strongest messages we're sending through television are that popularity is everything, and that if it doesn't make money it's not worth
anything.

— Linda Ellerbee


The man who lives in the news...is a man without memory.

— Jacques Ellul, The Political Illusion


The real media biases favor simplicity over complexity, persons over institutional processes, emotions over facts, and, most important, game over substance.

— Robert M. Entman, "Reporting Environmental Policy Debate: The Real Media Biases", Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 1:3 (Summer 1996): 78.


The point is not to change news, but to understand its limitations. Like map making, news cannot realistically hope to produce a model which perfectly represents all the contours and elevations of reality, but at least the basic distortions in any given mode of projection can be clarified.

— Edward J. Epstein, "The Values of Newsmen" Television Quarterly 10:2 (Winter 1973): p. 20.


For millions of years, humans have been programmed to live in small groups around the campfire. Having the constant background of TV gives us a sense of familiarity and well being. Human beings need motion, sights, sounds, activity around us, and TV provides that. It doesn't really matter how many channels we've got, because we're connecting with the constant commotion and babble of the campsite, pure and simple.

— Helen Fisher, anthropologist, quoted in Kellogg, M.A., "How America Really Watches TV,"
TV Guide, July 29, 1995, p. 30.


One of television's mysterious powers is to give us the illusion of immediate presence, but, in fact, it gives us the world through a lens darkly.

— Richard W. Fox, The New York Times Book Review, July 1992, p. 7


Like the original mirror man, Narcissus, network news gazes upon itself but thinks it sees an Other, 'The Real World.'

— William Gibson, "Network News: Elements of a Theory" Social Text 2:3 (Fall 1980): p. 104.


The sound bite is to television what the fang bite was to Dracula. The office seeker who has a thought that takes more than 30 seconds to express turns producers rabid."

— Walter Goodman, The New York Times, March 26, 1990.


An old theological principle applies: The immanent drives out the transcendent. By offering us so many matters to contemplate, television makes it hard, or profitless, to find the connective tissues. Television makes us atheoretical, just as it makes us a historical. It invites us to dwell in the moment and nowhere else. And that is where cynicism resides as well.

— Roderick P. Hart, Seducing America: How Television Charms the Modern Voter, p. 86.


If all candidates and parties are to have equal access to this essential and decisive campaign medium, without becoming deeply obligated to the big financial contributors from the worlds of business, labor or other major lobbies, then the time has come when a solution must be found to [the] problem of TV costs.

— Sen. John F. Kennedy, TV Guide, November, 1959.