Asking the question whether the mainstream media has a liberal or conservative bias is like asking whether al Qaeda uses too much oil in their hummus. I might think they use a little bit too much oil; some people might think it's a little dry. But the problem with al Qaeda is they want to kill us. And the problem with the mainstream media is that it has these other biases that are much more important.
You just have to be careful because social media can begin to affect personal things such as relationships, just to pin point. People have become so entitled as it relates to social media.
Globalization combined with technology, combined with social media and constant information, have disrupted people's lives sometimes in very concrete ways; a manufacturing plant closes and suddenly an entire town no longer has what was the primary source of employment.
Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights. He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul - his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.
If we are not serious about facts and what's true and what's not. And particularly in an age of social media where so many people are getting their information in sound bites and snippets off their phones, if we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.
Well, you know, News Corp is the only real media global - that has a global presence that's involved in TV production, in movies, in publishing, in newspapers, digital media, et cetera. So for a company like that to function, clearly it does not depend only on Rupert Murdoch or James Murdoch.
The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more effective [propaganda] will be.
If I use the media, even with tricks, to publicize a black youth being shot in the back in Teaneck, New Jersey... then I should be praised for it, and it's more of a comment on them than me that it would take tricks to make them cover the loss of life.
The purpose of propaganda is not to provide interesting distraction for blasé young gentlemen, but to convince... the masses. But the masses are slow moving, and they always require a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them.
The number of the opposition has certainly increased [in Iran]. There is more disgruntlement, but because there is no media, the voice of this opposition is not heard outside Iran.
The biases the media has are much bigger than conservative or liberal. They're about getting ratings, about making money, about doing stories that are easy to cover.