... Don [Hewitt, 60 Minutes exec producer] told me, "You have set broadcast journalism back 20 years." Naturally, I was both proud and elated although too modest to say so, but broadcast journalism recovered with alacrity, my contract wasn't renewed, and the incident was forgotten.
Nicholas von HoffmanForeign aid has been perfected so that it subsidizes corporate U.S. agriculture while preventing poor countries from developing profitable agriculture or feeding themselves.
Nicholas von HoffmanSome flag waving is good, a lot of flag waving is tolerable, incessant flag waving is crazy and dangerous and easily manipulated by the war party to get people bubbling at the mouth in fear and rage.
Nicholas von HoffmanWe preach free enterprise capitalism. We believe in it, we give our lives in war for it, but the closest most of us come to profiting from it are a few miserable shares of stock in a company that doesn't pay large enough dividends to keep a small mouse in cheese. The truth is, most of us are job serfs. At a time when invested capital returns 20 to 30 percent, we have no capital. We only have our wages and salaries, and a debt so high that something like 20c on every dollar we earn is spent to pay off what we owe.
Nicholas von HoffmanTaken as a whole the mass media seldom rises to the level of deplorable trash, but it is also true that there is no mass audience in America for anything better.
Nicholas von HoffmanThe American government has been harvesting the Middle Eastern grapes of wrath for a generation and not making a secret of it, either. As lousy as the mass media may be, there was enough news about what was transpiring, year after year, to get the gist of what was happening... No American can truthfully say that they could not find out what was going on.
Nicholas von Hoffman