Mass communication--wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued--presents us wit a serious daner, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in all the cities of the country. (p. 73)

Mass media wants bright lights. Mass media wants crazy clothes.

It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.

When you mutilate movies for mass media, you tamper with the hearts and minds of America.

More than the divides of race, class, or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, our culture has been carved up into radically distinct, unbridgeable, and antagonistic entities that no longer speak the same language and cannot communicate. This is the divide between a literate, marginalized minority and those who have been consumed by an illiterate mass culture.

The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.