Mainstream media is a term used to refer collectively to the various corporate controlled mass news media that influence a large number of people, and both reflect and shape prevailing currents of thought. The term is used to contrast with alternative media which may contain content with more dissenting thought at variance with the prevailing views of mainstream sources.
Quotes
Arranged chronologically
- Biden has been accused of...sexual assault... when the frequent presidential candidate was a senator... her story merits reporting... Several outlets have already done so, including The Intercept...but not our friends in the mainstream media. Unlike during the Kavanaugh hearings, they await substantiating evidence or, more likely, they await it all blowing over so they don’t have to write or say anything. Let’s not let it. This is no mild accusation. What Reade alleges Biden did doesn’t just disqualify you for the presidency. Nowadays, despite having occurred in 1993, it puts you in jail.
- With very few exceptions, the loudest voices to be heard from mass media are coming from individuals with wealth far above the financial vicinity of average Americans. Virtually none of the most widely read, seen and heard journalists are on the low end of the nation’s extreme income inequality. Viewed in that light — and keeping in mind that corporate ownership and advertising dominate mainstream media — it shouldn’t be surprising that few prominent journalists have much good to say about a presidential campaign fiercely aligned with the working class.
- More than ever, Bernie Sanders is public enemy number one for power elites that thrive on economic injustice. The Bernie 2020 campaign is a direct threat to the undemocratic leverage that extremely wealthy individuals and huge corporations constantly exert on the political process. No wonder we’re now seeing so much anti-Bernie rage from leading corporate Democrats — eagerly amplified by corporate media.
- Norman Solomon in The Escalating Class War Against Bernie Sanders, CounterPunch (18 Feb 2020)
- Every major U.S. war of the last several decades has begun the same way: the U.S. government fabricates an inflammatory, emotionally provocative lie which large U.S. media outlets uncritically treat as truth while refusing at air questioning or dissent, thus inflaming primal anger against the country the U.S. wants to attack... This was exactly the tactic used on February 23, when the narrative shifted radically in favor of those U.S. officials who want regime change operations in Venezuela.... beating the war drums... The U.S. media, by design, does not permit dissent on U.S. foreign policy, particularly when it comes to false claims about U.S. adversaries. That’s why skeptics of U.S. regime change in Venezuela, or dissenters on the prevailing orthodoxies about Russia, have largely been disappeared from mainstream media outlets... They know propaganda is their job...
- International opinion largely opposes Donald Trump’s current and threatened intervention in Venezuela, but that’s not the impression you get US corporate news media, who appear to be all-in with Trump’s push for the ouster of democratically elected President Nicolás Maduro... In reality, 75 percent of the world’s countries reject the US anointing of Juan Guaidó—whom most Venezuelans hadn’t heard of when Trump declared him their leader. And the UN has formally condemned US sanctions on Venezuela, which a special rapporteur compared to a “medieval siege.”
Corporate media’s fealty to the idea that the United States has the right if not the duty to overthrow other countries’ leadership to suit our—some of our—interests doesn’t begin and end with Venezuela. But the history of coverage of the country is especially illustrative of what it looks like when elite media work strenuously to maintain the storyline on an “official enemy.”- Alfredo Lopez Venezuela in the US Press, FAIR, (8 March 2019)
- It’s sickening to hear these [mainstream media] clowns repeatedly claim that “Assad murdered 500,000 of his people,” as though the U.S.-backed terrorists have played no role in the killings. I’ve viewed hundreds of beheadings and crucifixions online but none committed by Syria troops – all were proudly posted by the hellish filth that we’ve recruited, armed and trained for the past eight years. Major war crimes, like beheading 250 Syrian soldiers after running them across the desert in their underpants, were scarcely mentioned by the MSM.
- Here’s something that the mainstream media has left out when talking about Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from Syria: Congress never authorized sending troops to Syria. In fact, the UN also never approved. Our troops in Syria are in violation of domestic and international law.
- Ro Khanna in a Twitter post (31 December 2018)
- It’s almost as if much of the media has a mission to studiously avoid any serious discussion of policies that affect millions of people.
- David Sirota in a Twitter Post (28 December 2018)
- As anti-Russia hysteria spreads, speech taboos harden; any discourse at odds with tightening official political/media consensus brings immediate blowback, smear-mongering, and (where possible) silencing.
In this one-dimensional world the recent appearance of Stephen F. Cohen’s important book, War with Russia?, comes with special urgency, Cohen being one of the few... to challenge the onslaught of Russophobic narratives churned out relentlessly by the political/media establishment. And he remains virtually alone in going so far as to write about the very real specter of nuclear catastrophe.- Carl Boggs in Russophobia and the Specter of War, MintPressNews (20 December 2018)
- The media everywhere is mostly liberal, not just in the U.S. But in this country, 85% of journalists are registered Democrats – that’s just a fact. All the coverage on Trump all the time is negative. That’s distortion of the way things go in real life, because although the media has historically always been left-leaning, we’ve abandoned our pretense, or at least the effort, to be objective today.
- Lara Logan, quoted on WATCH: CBS' Lara Logan Calls Out Media For Propaganda-Like Coverage: 'This Interview Is Professional Suicide For Me', Daily Wire Feb 18, 2019
- We really have to fault the mass media of the United States, not just for the last few days, but the last decades, pretending that somehow, by implication, almost that John McCain was doing the people of North Vietnam a favor as he flew over them and dropped bombs. You would think, in the hagiography that we’ve been getting about his role in a squadron flying over North Vietnam, that he was dropping, you know, flowers or marshmallows or something. He was shot down during his 23rd mission dropping bombs on massive numbers of human beings, in a totally illegal and immoral war.
- Some 300 newspapers, large and small, joined today in publishing... editorials defending the First Amendment’s freedom of the press... their own efforts to combat current threats to that freedom posed by President Trump’s attacks on journalists and the entire Fourth Estate, which Trump routinely denounces in tweets and at rallies as “enemies of the people.”
However, missing from most of these full-throated editorials is any real defense of those who are in the trenches doing the hardest job of a free press, which is exposing the worst offenses of government: the war crimes, the craven systemic corruption of the political system, and the purveying of propaganda and disinformation in the furtherance of anti-democratic policies. (A good example would be the employment by most major news organizations of retired generals and colonels as war commentators without noting their roles on corporate boards of arms merchants that profit form war — a scandal that not one major news organization will expose.)- Dave Lindorff in Mainstream Media Hypocrisy on Display, Counterpunch (17 August 2018)
- Nowhere does one read, in these coordinated impassioned editorial paens to press freedom, a condemnation of the five-year torture and pursuit of [alternative media] journalist and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been holed up in the London embassy of Ecuador... His real crime, and the thing the US wants... him...for, is publishing leaked Pentagon documents and videotapes proving a policy in the Iraq war of massive and deliberate war crimes...corporate media.. fails to firmly support and defend the whistleblowers who often are critically important in bringing urgent stories of government and corporate wrongdoing to light.
- Dave Lindorff in Mainstream Media Hypocrisy on Display, Counterpunch (17 August 2018)
- Stories about corruption and internally government-generated violence concerning most unaligned countries abound in the MSM. These lies fuel hatred. And the public at large start a malicious rumor circuit. Which, in turn is taken over by the MSM, so that their lies are pushing in open doors. The war drums start beating. The populace wants foreign imposed order, they want blood and ‘regime change’. The consensus for war has once more worked.... Washington and other western powers and act so as to blame the “non-obedient” governments, whose regime must be changed.
- Peter Koenig in "What Really Happens to Nicaragua, Venezuela and Ecuador," Mintpress News (14 August 2018)
- As the U.S.-Saudi-led war against Yemen enters its third year, the people...find themselves struggling not only to survive but to be seen and heard by a mainstream media that is preoccupied with... [other topics]. When the international press corps does shine a light on the conflict in Yemen, it is described as a sectarian affair, a bloodless, “video-game” battle fought by nameless Iranian proxies against Saudi Arabia. But what’s really happening in the poorest country in the Middle East is a test of our humanity... the most horrific genocide you’ve likely never heard of.
- Mnar Muhawesh in "With MSM AWOL on Yemen," MintPress News series "To Give Yemenis Back Their Voice" (19 April 2018)
- 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... Fake news has been one of the more toxic products of that long-running effort to turn harried citizens into impulse-driven consumers who grasp at fictions and strongmen... and is perhaps even more dangerous in generating a demoralizing sense of society that’s been accompanied by rises in violent family breakdowns, lethal rampages at schools and other public places, and police killings of unarmed people. Profit-hungry journalism is drawn to such horrors like a moth to a flame as its media-conglomerate owners bombard us with gladiatorial sports and degrading entertainment...
- Jim Sleeper in "Don't Blame Social Media for Fake News. The Mainstream Media Got There First," Newsweek (11 September 2017)
- We go around lecturing the world about how they need to have freedom of the press and freedom of speech and yet here we are cracking down on free speech. ... the objective of doing this... is to block the truth from reaching the American public in the United States... We consider CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC - all of them are just a bunch of people screaming back and forth at one another. Most of it is just propaganda.... extremist opinion... Many Americans have been saying you know what, what we're seeing on RT news seems to be much more factual than what we're seeing on CNN and some of these other broadcast media sources. ...
- U.S. Virginia State Senator Dick Black in Senator Richard Black talks to RT Int (14 November 2017)
- For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fiction as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond. The fiction is taken for truth because the fiction is badly needed.
- Francis Hackett, What Mein Kampf Means for America (1941) Quoted in Don't Blame Social Media for Fake News. The Mainstream Media Got There First, Newsweek, (11 September 2017)
- All great movements are movements of the people, are volcanic eruptions of human passions and spiritual sensations, stirred . . . by . . . the torch of the word thrown into the masses, and are not the lemonade-like outpourings of aestheticizing literati and drawing-room heroes.”
- Adolph Hitler, in Mein Kampf (1926) Quoted in Don't Blame Social Media for Fake News. The Mainstream Media Got There First, Newsweek, (11 September 2017)
- Since World War II, the U.S. government has been involved in numerous wars and orchestrated coups in more than fifty countries based on fabricated lies created mainly by the CIA to destroy or remove governments not subservient to Washington’s interests... And time and time again, the mainstream-media (MSM) has been exposed as an agent of propaganda...at the start of the Vietnam War, the U.S. government was supplying the MSM with information on the Gulf of Tonkin incident and they accepted it without question... All the claims by the U.S. government and the MSM were based on lies....
Without public support, the U.S. government cannot engage in its imperial wars... The war in Iraq with the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” hoax with help from... the MSM also convinced the public to support the Bush administration’s Neocon agenda to remove Saddam Hussein. The American public fell for another lie and what was the outcome? A disastrous war that left Iraq permanently fragmented...created more terrorist networks...- Timothy Alexander Guzman in Silencing the Truth? The Mainstream Media Declares War on the Alternative Media, Global Research (17 July 2017)
- The MSM is exposed. They lost control of the narrative. The alternative media is growing with an array of independent news organizations, websites, bloggers, citizen journalists and a public that is sick and tired of the lies who just want the truth...The MSM [is] in a panic as their newspaper sales continue to plummet. Viewership for the MSM on basic television and cable has declined dramatically thanks to the internet... The MSM, particularly in the U.S. had sided with Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump during the elections, since then, it all has been downhill for the MSM. No one can trust the MSM and they never should...
I don’t believe that we as a people cannot change the course of history because the ruling elites from past imperial powers to the present American Empire have always lied to the people to advance their agendas, now we are turning the tide. I have hope in humanity because the truth is the foundation of humanity. My friends, it’s up to us, the people, to tell the truth to power because the lies perpetrated by the MSM have led the world to endless wars, poverty and a self-absorbed society based on useless consumption...The cadre of MSM organizations and personalities...are fighting for their survival...It will be an epic failure because the truth always finds its way.- Timothy Alexander Guzman in Silencing the Truth? The Mainstream Media Declares War on the Alternative Media, Global Research (17 July 2017)
- Essentially, every component of the mainstream media multiplex is foremost a business... under the aegis [protection] of monopolies. ... Even a casual observation of the interlocking ownership of big media must acknowledge that the concentration of likeminded Oligopolists are in unison to construct a consortium of predisposed narratives that has nothing to do with seeking the truth.
- Mainstream Media – All the Fake News That’s Fit to Print, 21WIRE, (11 February 2017)
- Corporations select journalists for their adherence to nihilism [rejection of all religious and moral principles] in reporting. The MSM’s denial of objective facts and practicing deception by generating actual fake news has produced generations of naïve, ill-informed and confused souls... the shearing of the sheeple society.
The selection agenda which determines what constitutes news is an editorial function that bears witness to the parameters for public conditioning. All other reporting is declared as ‘conspiracy theory.’... As the monopoly media manipulation resorts to their faux news narrative, astute observers understand that their broadcast lies are the real Fake News.- Mainstream Media – All the Fake News That’s Fit to Print, 21WIRE, (11 February 2017)
- When I was at MSNBC, I had issues with the Obama administration....I got told by the person who runs MSNBC...that Washington was not happy with my tone...This is how they play ball...If you are on the right side and you kiss up to them, then you get goodies. Access to their weasley politicians...and more importantly, money.
- Cenk Uygur quoted in When I Was At MSNBC, The Obama Administration Tried To Manipulate What I Said, RealClearPolitics, Tim Hains, (16 December 2016)
- It is enlightening to see how pugnacious the U.S. establishment...has been in dealing with the Ukraine crisis. The crisis arguably began when the Yanukovich government rejected an EU bailout program in favor of one offered by Russia. The mainstream media (MSM have virtually suppressed the fact that the EU proposal was not only less generous than the one offered by Russia, but that, whereas the Russian plan did not preclude further Ukrainian deals with the EU, the EU plan would have required a cut-off of further Russian arrangements. And whereas the Russian deal had no military clauses, that of the EU required that Ukraine affiliate with NATO. Insofar as the MSM dealt with this set of offers, they not only suppressed the exclusionary and militarized character of the EU offer, they tended to view the Russian deal as an improper use of economic leverage, “bludgeoning,” but the EU proposal was “constructive and reasonable” (Ed., NYT, November 20, 2014). Double standards seem to be fully internalized within the U.S. establishment. The protests that ensued in Ukraine were surely based in part on real grievances against a corrupt government, but they were also pushed along by right-wing groups and by U.S. and allied encouragement and support that increasingly had an anti-Russian and pro-accelerated regime change flavor.
- Edward S. Herman in War is Our Business and Business Looks Good, Z Magazine (28 June 2014)
- The sniper killings of police and protesters in Maidan [Ukraine] on February 21, 2014 brought the crisis to a new head. This violence overlapped with, and eventually terminated, a negotiated settlement of the struggle brokered by EU members that would have ended the violence, created an interim government, and required elections by December. The accelerated violence ended this transitional plan, which was replaced by a coup takeover along with the forced flight of Victor Yanukovich. There is credible evidence that the sniper shootings of both protesters and police were carried out by a segment of the protesters in a false-flag operation that worked exceedingly well, “government” violence serving as one ground for the ouster of Yanukovich. Most telling was the intercepted phone message between Estonia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Urmas Paet, and EU Foreign Policy chief Catherine Upton, in which Paet regretfully reported compelling evidence that the shots killing both police and protesters came from a segment of the protesters. This account was almost entirely suppressed in the MSM... There is also every reason to believe that the coup and establishment of a right-wing and anti-Russian government were encouraged and actively supported by U.S. officials.
- Edward S. Herman in War is Our Business and Business Looks Good, Z Magazine (28 June 2014)
- The degradation of mainstream American press coverage of Russia, a country still vital to US national security, has been under way for many years. If the recent tsunami of shamefully unprofessional and politically inflammatory articles in leading newspapers and magazines — particularly about the Sochi Olympics, Ukraine and, unfailingly, President Vladimir Putin — is an indication, this media malpractice is now pervasive and the new norm.
- Stephen F. Cohen, in Distorting Russia How the American media misrepresent Putin, Sochi and Ukraine, The Nation (February 12, 2014)
- We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. ... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
- Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928), p. 10
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