Brooke Gladstone > Quotes

“There's a long-standing debate in the media biz over whether the news outlets should give the public what it wants, or what it needs. This debate presupposes that media execs actually know what it wants or needs. And that there actually is a unitary "public.”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone On The Media

“Even if each of our realities is unique, our common cultures and environments ensure that we share some fundamental principles. That is what enables consensus, and that is what is under attack. By degrading the very notion of shared reality, Trump has disabled the engine of democracy. As”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time

“Objectivity works to repel the attacks of critics, like a kind of ethical pepper spray.”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone On The Media

“The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one’s own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time

“Citizens may recoil from paying for the news, he noted, because they see it as a natural right. But in the absence of consumer coin, the media must be fueled by advertisers seeking consumers and investors pursuing profit. Novelty and drama pay to keep the presses rolling, and so the “news” that supposedly informs reason becomes the dog wagged by its own tail.”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time

“Michael Signer, author of Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies, wrote that true demagogues must meet four criteria proposed by Cooper: They must pose as a mirror for the masses; ignite waves of intense emotion; use that emotion for political gain; and break the rules that govern us.”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time

“Part of the problem stems from the fact that facts, even a lot of facts, do not constitute reality. Reality is what forms after we filter, arrange, and prioritize those facts and marinate them in our values and traditions.

Reality is personal.”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Trouble With Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time

“Speech itself, inevitable and unrelenting is the wind. It can dance like a zephyr. It can roar or shriek or wail. But it cant be stopped. Everything we hate about the media today was present at its creation; its corrupt or craven practitioners, its easy manipulation by the powerful, its capacity for propagating lies, its penchant for amplifying rage.
Also present was everything we admire: factual information, penetrating analysis, probing investigation, truth spoken to power. Same as it ever was.”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone On The Media

“What do you think of yourself? What do you think of the world? They are riddles of the Sphinx and in some way or the other we must deal with them. If we decide to leave them unanswered that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril
We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road, we might be dashed to pieces. We do not know whether there is any right one. What must we do?”
― Brooke Gladstone

“Speech itself, inevitable and unrelenting, is the wind. It can dance like a zephyr.
It can roar shriek or wail. But it can't be stopped.
Everything we hate about the media today was present at its creation: its corrupt or craven practitioners, its easy manipulation by the powerful, its capacity for propagating lies, its penchant for amplifying rage.
Also present was everything we admire -- and require -- from the media: factual information, penetrating analysis, probing investigation, truth spoken to power.
Same as it ever was.”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone On The Media

“What we're really dealing with is a mirror:  an exalting degrading tedious and transcendent funhouse mirror of America.
Media is a plural noun; We're dealing with a whole mess of mirrors.
they are not well calibrated; they are fogged and cracked. But you are in there reflected somewhere and so is everyone else.”
― Brooke Gladstone

“The modern masses do not believe in anything visible. . . . What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time

“The big threat of photoshopification is not that we will believe documents and photos are fake. Its that we'll find it easier to disbelieve documents and photos that are real, when its convenient.”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone On The Media

“Getting history right is pretty much the most important thing a citizen can do in a nation at war with itself--as ours was. And is.”
― Brooke Gladstone

“he contrasts two pivotal works of dystopian fiction: George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In Orwell’s vision, he notes, we are crushed by a merciless oppression imposed by others, whereas in Huxley’s vision, we are seduced, sedated, and satiated. We enslave ourselves. “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much information that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared that we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. “In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. “In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. . . .” Orwell,”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time

“Reality can really tax your imagination.”
― Brooke Gladstone

“Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. . . . It is just a very large version of Disneyland.”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time

“The President, however, did instruct the Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr., to determine whether NPR and PBS are complying with the statutory mandate that no person shall be subjected to discrimination in employment on the grounds of race, color, religion, national origin or sex. All this based on the idea that our nation, now firmly under the leadership of white Christian men, must safeguard, at all costs, the marginalized, disfavored voices of white Christian men.

All others, excluding Trump allies, have risen to power through an unjust system.”
― Brooke Gladstone

“we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. . . . 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.”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time

“Meanwhile”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time

“as eminent political theorist Hannah Arendt saw back in 1951: “Would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones.”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time

“Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it. Finally suppose he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence that his belief is wrong. What will happen? The individual will frequently emerge not only unshaken but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed he may even show a new fervor for converting other people to his view.”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone On The Media

“But in the absence of consumer coin, the media must be fueled by advertisers seeking consumers and investors pursuing profit. Novelty and drama pay to keep the presses rolling, and so the “news” that supposedly informs reason becomes the dog wagged by its own tail.”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time

“Worrying about offending people drags us back to the lowest common denominator
Our enemies are not the digital bits that dance across our screens but the neural impulses that animate our lizard brains”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone On The Media

“Many focus on what they perceive as a loss of some vital aspect of our humanity. To me, the sessence of being human is not in our limitations. It is our ability to reach beyond our limitations. We did not stay on the ground. We did not even stay on the planet. And we are already not settling for the limitations of our biology.”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone On The Media

“Everything we hate about the media today was present at its creation: its corrupt or craven practitioners, its easy manipulation by the powerful, its capacity for propagating lies, its penchant for amplifying rage. Also present was everything we admire and require: factual information, penetrating analysis, probing investigation, truth spoken to power.”
― Brooke Gladstone

“Humans run on emotion, assumption and impulse. We cant function on logic alone. But emotion assumption and impulse also allow us to weave cozy cocoons of unexamined prejudice and received wisdom. They shield us from the pain of unwelcome information.”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone On The Media