In: knowledge.

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”.

The “mainstream media” is a collective journalistic entity that provides news and information to a large audience.
This is in contrast with the “alternative media”, which reaches a much smaller and often more specific audience (eg: the people who seek the real news)

Mainstream media show you news based on their financial incentives and political affiliations.
Some news websites are only making money from ADS (commercials) which means the content is completely irrelevant, just enough to make people want to visit the ads.
They influence you in their best interest, so that they can make more money. The news is not a goal, it’s just the means to the objective of making a profit.
This makes them untrustworthy and unreliable.

Today’s mainstream media is much more like Hollywood movies, and much less like news.

Quotes

If you don’t read the newspapers, you are uninformed. If you do read them, you are misinformed.
– Mark Twain

Television is altering the meaning of “being informed” by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation… Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing.
– Neil Postman

Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your Honor. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.
– Mark Twain

It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and myths that surround it.
– John Pilger

The press is our chief ideological weapon.
– Nikita Khrushchev

Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
– Henry Louis Mencken

I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy.
– A. J. Liebling

The most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the ‘best’ sources.
– Walter Karp

The job of the President is to set the agenda and the job of the press is to follow the agenda that the leadership sets.
– Lawrence Grossman, longtime head of PBS and NBC News

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups… So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind.
I ought to know. I do the same thing.
– Philip K. Dick

Following the same course that virtually every other major industry has in the last two decades, a relentless series of mergers and corporate takeovers has consolidated control of the media into the hands of a few corporate behemoths.
The result has been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to the American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state.
– David McGowan

The media’s 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

Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.
– Jim Morrison

Mainstream news wants to keep you as a useful idiot. Instead, try being a non-useful idiot.
– Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)

I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.
– Christopher Hitchens (English-born American author, journalist, and literary critic)

Just because something isn’t a lie does not mean that it isn’t deceptive. A liar knows that he is a liar, but one who speaks mere portions of truth in order to deceive is a craftsman of destruction.
– Criss Jami

Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people.
– Black Hugo L.

Articles