Quotes by category:
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Observations on Media
If we are to have the public conversations essential to taking on serious dilemmas from climate change to criminal justice reform, we need forums for those conversations. The media can facilitate the conversations or shut them down. They can open up or constrain our beliefs about what is possible, what is desirable, who is deserving, and which perspectives are legitimate.
Sarah Ruth van Gelder, Executive Editor, YES magazine
A flawed media, I suggest, leads to a flawed democracy. Ill-informed citizens cannot make proper judgments about their leaders' actions, about the actions that take place in their names, about the laws that govern them. The media matter.
Distinguished former BBC news anchor, foreign correspondent and journalist Michael Buerk speaking to students at Ryerson University, Toronto
The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news,
we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.
David Brinkley, American TV network news anchor
One of the few good things about modern times:
If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain.
You will have entertained us.
Kurt Vonnegut, author
I have a philosophy: that we all teach. Anybody in the media has a very large megaphone that can reach a lot of different people, and so whatever they say, whatever they do, however they conduct themselves, whatever they produce has an influence, and it’s teaching somebody something.
George Lucas, filmmaker
The positive development of the media at the service of the common good is a responsibility of each and every one,. Because of the close connections the media have with economics, politics and culture, there is required a management system capable of safeguarding the centrality and dignity of the person, the primacy of the family as the basic unit of society and the proper relationship among them.
Pope John Paul II in his apostolic letter, "The Rapid Development," February 2005
on Media Ownership and Consolidation
Whoever controls the media -- the images -- controls the culture.
Allen Ginsberg, poet and author
At this late stage, media companies have grown so large and powerful, and their dominance has become so detrimental ... that there remains only one alternative: bust up the big conglomerates. ... We've done this before: to railroad trusts in the first part of the 20th century, to Ma Bell more recently. Politically, big media may be on the wrong side of history.
Ted Turner, Time Warner board member and Turner Broadcasting System/CNN founder, in an article for Washington Monthly
Global media will be and is fast becoming the predominant business of the 21st century...more important than government. It's more important than educational institutions and non-profits.
Gerald Levin, former CEO of Time Warner
I would like to recall our attention to the subject of media access, and of co-responsible participation in their administration," the pope said. "If the communications media are a good destined for all humanity, then ever-new means must be found -- including recourse to opportune legislative measures -- to make possible a true participation in their management by all. The culture of co-responsibility must be nurtured.
Pope John Paul II
in his apostolic letter, "The Rapid Development," February 2005
on Why Media Literacy Education is Important
I have advocated for 30 years that, in order to preserve
our democracy and protect ourselves against demagogues, we should have
courses in schools
on how to watch TV, how to read newspapers, how to analyze a speech – how
to understand the limitations of each medium and make a judgment as to
the accuracy or the motives involved.
Walter Cronkite, retired news anchor for CBS television network.
It is no longer enough to simply read and write. Students
must also become literate in the understanding of visual images. Our
children must learn
how to spot a stereotype, isolate a social cliché and distinguish
facts from propaganda, analysis from banter, important news from coverage.
Ernest Boyer, past president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and former U.S. Commissioner of Education
When people talk to me about the digital divide, I think of it not being so much about who has access to what technology as about who knows how to create and express themselves in the new language of the screen. If students aren't taught the language of sound and images, shouldn't they be considered as illiterate as if they left college without being able to read and write?
George Lucas, filmmaker
In the 21st Century, the century our children will live in -- the century they will, in fact, shape -- media literacy will not be a luxury; it will be a necessity.
Linda Ellerbee, journalist, television producer
If you want to use television to teach somebody something, you have first to teach somebody how to use television.
Umberto Eco, professor of language and semiotics (the study of symbols), historian and philosopher
Academics object [to media education] because many of them don't consider media as serious. How they can overlook the profound influence that media have on youth ... is an attitude I cannot understand. Teachers can and should help young people to be critical and intelligent consumers of the media. Media executives object because media education can and should make people critical, and I sometimes think that some media executives prefer couch potatoes -- those who watch entertainment and perhaps news programming without a critical eye -- and then buy most of the things that are advertised.
Archbishop John Foley, president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communications, at a seminar on "Media Education: World Experiences" held Nov. 14, 2003 in Rome, Italy
A vast work of formation is needed to assure that the mass media be known and used intelligently and appropriately," the pope said. "The new vocabulary they introduce into society modifies both learning processes and the quality of human relations, so that, without proper formation, these media run the risk of manipulating and heavily conditioning, rather than serving people. This is especially true for young people, who show a natural propensity toward technological innovations and as such are in even greater need of education in the responsible and critical use of the media.
Pope John Paul II in his apostolic letter, "The Rapid Development," February 2005
Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are our only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
Thomas Jefferson, U.S. president
on Children & Media
The question parents need to ask is not, "Is this more educational than Mickey Mouse?" but "Is this more educational than other activities?" There are so many more important things preschoolers should be doing than playing video games.
Dr. Michael Rich, director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children's Hospital Boston and professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Rich helped write the American Academy of Pediatrics' policy statement on media use for young children.
They all purport to be educational, but I have yet to see a video or computer game with educational software backed by any scientific research. They're backed by market research about what parents will buy. The claims they make concern me because parents believe them. I think parents want to believe them because they want to get their kid quiet in a corner.
Dr. Michael Rich, director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children's Hospital Boston and professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Rich helped write the American Academy of Pediatrics' policy statement on media use for young children.
I believe knowledge is better than censorship. I'm not talking about letting your kid run wild on the computer. I'm talking about media literacy. What's important is that kids understand the technologies that surround them, especially as our telephone, our television and our computer race to become one entity. That way new technology can become useful tool of the child, instead of the child becoming a tool of the technology.
Linda Ellerbee, journalist, television producer
Why Visual Literacy is Important
People everywhere need to learn how to express their ideas using pictures and graphics instead of text. That's because words undergo a strange transformation when they travel from the page or computer to the large screen -- they become incredibly boring.
Tad Simons, Editor in Chief, Presentations magazine
Curiously, while projection technologiy has been improving and maturing at an unprecendented pace, these has been a conspicuous lack of progress in the area of presentation graphics. Today's projectors may be able to paint the walls of our cave with the most mesmerizing imagery in history, borne of the most dramatic engineering wizardry every conceived, but today's presentation graphics look pretty much the same as they did five or 10 years ago. In that sense, nothing has changed; the mediocrity has just gotten easier to see.
Tad Simons, Editor in Chief, Presentations magazine
on Religion, Popular Culture and Media
Many congregations are looking for a Disney-style experience.
Greg Barron, Fort Worth, Texas builder, on the trend toward adding surround-sound audio systems, giant TV screens and movie theaters to new churches. Reported in USA Weekend, Oct. 29-31, 2004.
Like a shopping mall in which there is a quantity of stuff for prices that can't be beat, [attendees] see church as theater.
Duncan Stroik, achitect, professor at the University of Notre Dame School Architecture, and editor of the journal Sacred Architecture
on Commercialism, Media & the Environment
Visual chaos is not good for anyone. Billboard companies should not be allowed to sell what they don't own -- our field of vision and our civic pride.
Meg Maguire, president, Scenic America (motto: "Change is Inevitable: Ugliness is Not")
There are so few people in the world saying, 'I wish advertising were a little more intrusive.
David "Jelly" Helm, longtime adman, now
member of an advisory board to a United Nations environment program on the effect advertising has on sustainable consumption and usage of natural resources
on Advertising, Commercialism & Branding
What I would love is to have any boy in the world who thinks of pirates to think of…Disney pirates.
Robert Iger, president, The Walt Disney Company
It isn't enough to just advertise on television... You've got to reach kids throughout their day - in school, as they're shopping at the mall... or at the movies. You've got to become part of the fabric of their lives.
Corporate marketer Sharon Beder, as quoted in the book "Global Spin."
If you own this child at an early age... you can own this child for years to come.
Kids 'R' Us president, Mike Searles
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