Ben Bagdikian Quote: "Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average ..."

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Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's St Matthew Passion on a ukulele: The instrument is too crude for the work, for the audience and for the performer.
Ben Bagdikian / Journalist
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Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's St Matthew Passion on a ukulele: The instrument is too crude for the work, for the audience and for the performer.
⇛ Ben Bagdikian (Journalist)

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The safest way to ensure diversity of opinion is diverse ownership. But this ideal has been sacrificed by our government.

Ben Bagdikian Journalist

Letting a maximum number of views be heard regularly is not just a nice philosophical notion. It is the best way any society has yet discovered to detect maladjustments quickly, to correct injustices, and to discover new ways to meet our continuing stream of novel problems that rise in a changing environment.

Ben Bagdikian Journalist

In the US, voters cast ballots for individual candidates who are not bound to any party program except rhetorically, and not always then. Some Republicans are more liberal than some Democrats, some libertarians are more radical than some socialists, and many local candidates run without any party identification. No American citizen can vote intelligently without knowledge of the ideas, political background, and commitments of each individual candidate.

Ben Bagdikian Journalist

By now, the corporations that dominate our media, like alcoholic fat cats, treat this situation as theirs by right... Their concept of a diversity of views is the full range of politics and social values from center to far right. The American audience, having been exposed to a narrowing range of ideas over the decades, often assumes that what they see and hear in the major media is all there is. It is no way to maintain a lively marketplace of ideas, which is to say it is no way to maintain a democracy.

Ben Bagdikian Journalist

Universal peace sounds ridiculous to the head of an average family.

Kin Hubbard Cartoonist

The average person is either a weakling, or just a happy person who wants to get along, or thinks being tough is having big muscles and strutting around town and having a good-looking girlfriend.