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The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits – a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage. Hunter S Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
That the individual shall have full protection in person and in property is a principle as old as the common law; but it has been found necessary from time to time to define anew the exact nature and extent of such protection. Political, social, and economic changes entail the recognition of new rights, and the common law, in its eternal youth, grows to meet the demands of society.
The press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency. Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious, but has become a trade, which is pursued with industry as well as effrontery. To satisfy a prurient taste the details of sexual relations are spread broadcast in the columns of the daily papers ... The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual; but modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury. Louis D Brandeis & Warren, The Right to Privacy
In March, 1915, the J P Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and power interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together twelve men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press ... They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of twenty-five of the greatest papers.
An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers. Oscar Callaway, 1917
I don’t take very seriously the media or the press in this country who in the case of the Persian Gulf War were nothing more than unpaid employees of the Department of Defense. And who most of the time, most of the time function as a kind of unofficial public relations agency for the United States Government. So I don’t really listen to them, I don’t really believe in my country and I got to tell you folks I don’t get all choked up about yellow ribbons and American flags. George Carlin
The press ignored or glossed over serious questions about George Bush. From repeated allegations that he had gone AWOL to insider trading. Orwell Rolls in His Grave, 2003
If you can control the access of the press to [Reagan], you have a hell of a lot better chance of him not screwing up. Lyn Nofziger, Reagan’s campaign press secretary, interview Mark Hertsgaard
The year is 1917 and representative Oscar Calloway enters a disturbing statement into the US Congressional record. The statement reveals why J P Morgan interests hired twelve high ranking news managers. The twelve were asked to determine the most influential newspapers in America. They were to figure out how many news organisations it would take to control generally the policy of the daily press of the United States. The twelve found it was only necessary to purchase the control of twenty-five of the greatest papers ... Soon that policy would be defined by J P Morgan and his colleagues ... The Council on Foreign Relations. Beginner’s Guide to the New World Order, Youtube
Politicians on both sides, and the labour movement in general, I think are worth only contempt for their failure to stand up over this Murdoch affair. Politicians who in the past have spoken up against Murdoch and his ownership and his citizenship and so on ... have gone so far as to say the opposite on this occasion. David Bowman, former editor-in-chief Sydney Morning Herald
Freedom of the press in Britain means freedom to print such of the proprietor’s prejudices as the advertisers don’t object to. Hannen Swaffer
The biggest political joke in America is that we have a liberal press. It’s a joke taken seriously by a surprisingly large number of people ... The myth of the liberal press has served as a political weapon for conservative and right-wing forces eager to discourage critical coverage of government and corporate power ... Americans now have the worst of both worlds: a press that, at best, parrots the pronouncements of the powerful and, at worst, encourages people to be stupid with pseudo-news that illuminates nothing but the bottom line. Mark Hertzgaard
Embedded in The New York Times’s institutional perspective and reporting methodologies are all sorts of quite debatable and subjective political and cultural assumptions about the world. And with some noble exceptions, The Times by design or otherwise has long served the interests of the same set of elite and powerful factions. Glenn Greenwald
They do have the power to act together. I think back to the time when Rupert Murdoch moved his operation in London to his fortress in East London called Wapping when everything changed. It was a sea-change. In the process he sacked five thousand people just like that. The journalists almost didn’t go. The vote was lost in the union ballots by about half a dozen. Now, had they voted not to go, I doubt whether that embodiment of everything that Murdoch stands for would ever have got off the ground. So journalists do have power. And it’s really up to them to organise that power. John Pilger, interview Melbourne 2009
It seems that what we have now is a media echo-chamber that gives out broadly speaking the same news, the same opinions, the same message, while those who own and control the media are becoming fewer and their power greater all over the world. John Pilger, Breaking the Mirror: The Murdoch Effect, 1997
In 1986 the equivalent of an earthquake hit Fleet Street. Rupert Murdoch had been secretly preparing to move his newspapers to a factory in Wapping in East London surrounded by guards and razor-wire. When he finally made his move he sacked more than five-thousand people. ibid.
Such relentless inhumanity forms the iceberg beneath the Guardian’s current exposé of Murdoch’s alleged payment of £1m hush money to those whose phones his News of the World reporters have criminally invaded. ‘A cultural Chernobyl’, is how the German investigative journalist Reiner Luyken, based in London, described Murdoch’s effect on British life. Of course, there is a colourful Fleet Street history of lies, damn lies, but no proprietor ever attained the infectious power of Murdoch’s putrescence. To public truth and decency and freedom, he is as the dunghill is to the blowfly. The rich and famous can usually defend themselves with expensive libel actions; but most of Murdoch’s victims are people like the Hillsborough parents, who suffer without recourse. John Pilger, Murdoch: A Cultural Chernobyl, article New Statesman
In devilish dreams the horror show of deep-frozen Saturday nights fronting the gates of Hades at Murdoch’s Wapping. Snorting leviathan lorries smashing down the hill at the barbed wire and the purple-faced protesters, rage-red front covers of The Sun flapping like pirate flags in the windscreens. Bobby-boys in blue finger tenderly their bully-sticks. esias
There are laws to protect the freedom of the press’s speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press. Mark Twain, License of the Press, 1873
I do believe the popular press is drinking in the last chance saloon. David Mellor, interview Hard News 21st December 1989
Margaret Thatcher gave Rupert Murdoch power in return for his unqualified support ... Power which he has used pretty ruthlessly over the years. David Mellor, former Conservative Cabinet minister
When you start hacking into the phone of a thirteen-year-old murder victim, even altering the evidence – deleting some of the messages and so on – that suddenly struck people as disgusting. Disgusting. And I think that was the end of it for the Murdoch’ empire. David Mellor