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Protections against government tyranny do not prevent societies from tyrannizing themselves through the force of public opinion.

Timur Kuran • Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification

Those who knew some English were permitted to speak to the reporters, provided they didn’t stray from the script they’d rehearsed with Truman and Julio on the journey.

Excerpted from " • A tale of sex, greed and Filipinos on Coney Island

History tells us, that from the moment when the moral forces on which a civilisation rested have lost their strength, its final dissolution is brought about by those unconscious and brutal crowds known, justifiably enough, as barbarians. Civilisations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. C

Gustave Le Bon • The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

Howard K. Smith, who fled Nazi Germany on the last train from Berlin before Hitler declared war on the United States in 1941; James Cameron, whose iconic 1946 report from the Bikini atom tests was perhaps the most literary and philosophical article ever published in a newspaper.

Robert Fisk • The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East

The website may be free of advertisements, but that hasn't stopped entities from trying to exercise influence. Spammers, public relations companies, and those who can gain from crafting a public perception have turned their sights to Wikipedia. Thomas Friedman noted in his book: "it is not an accident that IBM today has a senior staffer who polices... See more

Andrew Lih • The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia

I have a good friend who’s one of the seven or eight main editors of a major American newspaper, and he happens to be very much opposed to U.S. policies towards Central America, and towards the arms race, as well as several other things. He tries to craft editorials which will just barely sneak through under the ideological barrier, but will sort o

Peter Mitchell • Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky

Thus, with the vast majority of front-page war stories never addressing the whys of the fight but instead its whos and hows, the predominant media message to the public was evident: the thing you should be paying attention to here is the conduct of the war, not the wisdom of it.

Robert B. Cialdini • Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

That’s why Simonson and Rosen have named their theory “absolute value.” The Internet, they say, will be a brand-assassinating technology, flooding the world with information and drowning out the signal of advertising for many products.

Derek Thompson • Hit Makers

What you see is big corporations selling relatively privileged audiences in the decision-making classes to other businesses. Now you ask, what picture of the world do you expect to come out of this arrangement? Well, a plausible answer is, one that puts forward points of view and political perspectives which satisfy the needs and the interests and