Quotes & Sayings About News Media

In the 1970s, 'The Boys on the Bus' exposed how a clubby pack of male political reporters ruled the road to the White House and shaped the news. Four decades later, an outsider gal from Alaska has commandeered the 2012 media bus - and left Beltway journalism insiders eating her dust. — Michelle Malkin

You know, the media and politicians are always gonna be in a bit of tension with one another and probably most of the time that's healthy and indeed even creative. But it's where - it's really when news organisations are used as kind of instruments of politics that it gets tricky. — Tony Blair

You have to get up pretty early in the morning to invent the news. — Lauren Beukes

After a victim has reported a crime to the police, many people believe that the decision whether or not to charge the suspect with a crime, and then prosecute the suspect, is the prerogative of the victim. News media often contribute to this misconception in stories about rape victims by reporting that a victim 'declined to press charges.' In fact, the criminal justice system gives victims no direct say in the matter. It's the police, for the most part, who decide whether a suspect should be arrested, and prosecutors who ultimately determine whether a conviction should be pursued. — Jon Krakauer

The reason why she had chosen journalism was because of those who had done so before her. Stalwart women and men who reported stories in the days before the Internet. Before it was fashionable to learn Mass Communication. A long time before being a TV reporter and calling up your family to see your face beamed to their homes was an in thing. They were those who had left their families behind as they pursued the truth, opting to go to jail when the government hounded them to reveal their sources. Men and women that would rather quit than write editorials the management wanted them to write. Journalists who never wrote a word they would have to disown. Journalists who took their last breath as they wrote an article was true to what they believed in. They would never sit down and take stock of the stories they had covered and written saying, So what if twenty of these are non-stories, I at least had five I believed in. — Shweta Ganesh Kumar

I used to love going on a junket and promoting a film when it was not a 24-hour news cycle, and when there weren't so many media outlets. You could actually talk about the film. — Debra Winger

The newspapers, the magazines, television, and radio produce a commodity: news, from the raw material of events. Only news is salable, and the news media determine which events are news, which are not. — Erich Fromm

To be sure, administrations since Ronald Reagan had gone out of their way to massage and 'spin' news to the president's advantage, while the media did its best to un-spin it. — Nigel Hamilton

An apparently good way to get more information about religious group would be through the media. In actual fact, it's probably the worst. Why? Because what makes hot news stories are things like controversy, opposing views, harm, blood, sex, big names, big money, scandal, ect. — Stan Koehler

News at Work is a vivid, inside look at the collision of print journalism and electronic media. Based on close access to the leading news organizations in Buenos Aires, Boczkowski documents how contemporary journalism is caught in the grip of emulation; this spiral of imitation exacerbated further by global news media and their intensifying homogenization. The portrait of this transformation of the news is both fascinating and deeply worrying, and is guaranteed to provoke debate. — Walter W. Powell

This is what you do now to give your day topography
scan the boxes, read the news, see the chain of your friends reporting about themselves, take the 140-character expository bursts and sift through for the information you need. It's a highly deceptive world, one that constantly asks you to comment but doesn't really care what you have to say. The illusion of participation can sometimes lead to participation. But more often than not, it only leads to more illusion, dressed in the guise of reality. — David Levithan

The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned.
The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.
With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. — Henry A. Wallace

I can't think of anything that would do more toward putting us back on the road to liberty and personal responsibility than for the average American, and for the news media, to come to the understanding that we are not a democracy, nor were we supposed to be. — Neal Boortz

The most puzzling thing about TV is the steady advance of the sponsor across the line that has always separated news from promotion, entertainment from merchandising. The advertiser has assumed the role of originator, and the performer has gradually been eased into the role of peddler. — E.B. White

Media was once about protecting a name; on the web it is about building one. — Ryan Holiday

Scientific fraud, plagiarism, and ghost writing are increasingly being reported in the news media, creating the impression that misconduct has become a widespread and omnipresent evil in scientific research. — Heinrich Rohrer

If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly. — Thomas Sowell

After The Bomb we developed a fairly good system for moving food around and have avoided the kind of massive famines that attract the media. Although of course we've had a fair number of them, particularly in Africa, since The Bomb was written. But we have had a steady level of attrition of malnutrition and malnutrition-related disease. Probably something on the order of 5 to 10 million people starve to death each year, but they're spread out; they're not dramatic news events. — Paul R. Ehrlich

The absence of even rough agreement on the facts puts every opinion on equal footing and therefore eliminates the basis for thoughtful compromise. It rewards not those who are right, but those - like the White House press office - who can make their arguments most loudly, most frequently, most obstinately, and with the best backdrop. — Barack Obama

The defining characteristic of today's intellectual and media elite is that it swims merrily in a sea of fantasy. The world of television is essentially a fantasy world, and television is today's [1980's] common denominator of communication, today's unifying American experience. This has frightening implications for the future. Ideas that fit on bumper stickers are not ideas at all, they simply are attitudes. And attitudinizing is no substitute for analysis. Unfortunately, too often television is to news as bumper stickers are to philosophy, and this has a corrosive effect on public understanding of those issues on which national survival may depend. — Richard M. Nixon

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

After I do my first writing of the day, I will generally look at Twitter and Google News - and that's my big media secret. I look at Twitter and I look at Google because they pull all the headlines from other websites. — Mallory Ortberg

If it's true that nothing is more potent than an idea, then those who control the media can direct minds en masse. — Lance Morcan

If you watch the evening news, Dr. Kissinger is very often brought on to sort of be the statesman of his age and to reflect dispassionately on world events. And so a film challenging his legacy, a film that assesses charges that are quite grave against him, is something that is touchy for the media to show. — Eugene Jarecki

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
[Remarks on the 20th Anniversary of the Voice of America; Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, February 26, 1962] — John F. Kennedy

It's not the world that's got so much worse but the news coverage that's got so much better. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

I get most of my news updates from electronic and social media. — LeVar Burton

Twitter is awesome to share news with fans, but I would never choose to only have social media and put everything in my life on display. — Sarah Hyland

[...] as with all vices, vast and lucrative industries are ready to supply the necessary material. It sometimes seems as if most of the news consists of outrage porn, selected specifically to pander to our impulse to judge and punish, to get us off on righteous indignation. — Tim Kreider

Television, radio, social media. The 24/7 news cycle plows forward mercilessly on our desks, in our cars and in our pockets. Thousands and thousands of messages and voices bombard us from the moment we wake, fighting for our attention. All we see and hear, all day long, is news. And most of it is bad. — Joseph Prince

There appears to be a lot of confusion about the biological benefits of elevated CO2 because the popular media typically fails to report them. Doomsday scenarios of global warming are much more dramatic than the good news of global greening. — Keith E. Idso

With the growing reliance on social media, we no longer search for news, or the products and services we wish to buy. Instead they are being pushed to us by friends, acquaintances and business colleagues. — Erik Qualman

There are many benefits to a sports entity breaking news directly to their recipients: the entity has full control over the message and how it is shared versus previously relying on a media outlets to translate or distribute as they choose. Also, there's no quicker place for valuable information to spread than Twitter. — Amy Jo Martin

It is not so much freedom of speech but the right to truth that great men protect. — Criss Jami

I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office. — Newt Gingrich

Most people I've talked to are convinced that they're not getting valuable information from news media anymore. I'm not talking about tinfoil-hatters either, these are intelligent people who believe their news media has failed them. — Drew Curtis

And why do we worship hindsight (as in the news media's constant rehash of the day, the week, the year) and yet distrust foresight, which actually might make a difference in our lives? — Gavin De Becker

Every time I criticize what I consider to be excesses or faults in the news business, I am accused of repression, and the leaders of various media professional groups wave the First Amendment as they denounce me. That happens to be my amendment, too. It guarantees my free speech as it does their freedom of the press ... There is room for all of us - and for our divergent views - under the First Amendment. — Spiro T. Agnew

The White House and the media need one another in order to be successful in their jobs. The White House depends on the media to make its case to the public; the media need the White House to fill their airtime and news columns. — Eric Alterman

Whenever there's a tragedy involving gun use, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, the gun-control lobby and the news media seize it as another opportunity to exploit the emotions of uninformed American people for political gain. — Walter E. Williams

You never hear about a pit bull doing anything good in the media. And they have a stigma to them ... and, in many ways, pit bulls are like young African-American males. Whenever you see us in the news, it's for getting shot and killed or shooting and killing somebody - for being a stereotype. — Ryan Coogler

I'm very proud to know the Koch brothers. This may be a breaking news announcement for the media: I am the Koch brothers' brother from another mother. — Herman Cain

Soon after [George Yeo] became a politician, he made a famous speech, and for the first time, the term "OB markers" was used in political discourse. He was using golfing language to vividly make the point that Singapore needed OB markers to demarcate areas of public life that should remain out of bounds to social activism and the media. Otherwise, society paid an unacceptably high price. His essential point was that Singaporeans worked better if the cover of the banyan tree did not remain so broad. He was signalling that the state should pull back and give the people more free play. — Cheong Yip Seng

What the visual media could not carry into living rooms, the general public could not long remain exercised about.
Statistically, a majority of the electorate could not or did not read complicated issues;
no pictures, no news; no news, no event; no great sympathy on the part of the public nor sustained interest from the media: safe politics for the Company. — C.J. Cherryh

People are interested in things not necessarily covered by the mainstream media, so they download things online. The categories are growing because people find out that they're not able to get information about stories that are of interest to them on the evening news. — Soledad O'Brien

The media, like anything else, can be bought. Everything, it seems, has its price. Even the free press. — Lance Morcan

[T]here's a good reason to stay pessimistic about deficits as far as the eye can see. It's called the 'news' media. Legislators who want to get re-elected will clearly want to avoid any spending decision that will create bad national publicity, and our news media, the manufacturers of bad national publicity, will send crying victims down the assembly line at the slightest thought of a social spending cut or freeze. Exhibit A is Sen. Jim Bunning. — L. Brent Bozell Jr.

The media have just buried the last yuppie, a pathetic creature who had not heard the news that the great pendulum of public consciousness has just swung from Greed to Compassion and from Tex-Mex to meatballs — Barbara Ehrenreich

A free press doesn't mean it's not a tame press. — Andrew Vachss

People in the news media after I got caught said how could you have not caught this guy? He had 50 corrections in four years. That's a lot of corrections. Well what they failed to look at is how many stories there were and out of 700 plus stories, 50 corrections is not a high amount. — Jayson Blair

As a proponent of big-picture analysis, media pioneer and Time founder Henry Luce asserted, there was more money to be made in slow news than fast news. — David Halberstam

Conservatives were griping for decades about liberal media and nobody paid attention. Now, all of a sudden, one news channel has gotten a whole new community of people freaked out. — Michael K. Powell

The media uses polls to create news stories. I think polls are just an extension of the editorial page, an excuse to get them on the front page. You can ask any question you want, get any answer you want, and then run around with that as a news story. — Rush Limbaugh

A journalist's job is to collect information," Ovid said to Pete.
"Nope," Pete said. "That's what we do. It's not what they do."
Dellarobia was unready to be pushed out of the conversation just like that. "Then what do you think the news people drive their Jeeps all the way out here for?"
"To shore up the prevailing view of their audience and sponsors."
"Pete takes a dim view of his fellow humans," Ovid said. "He prefers insects.
Dellarobia turned her chair halfway around to face Pete, scraping noisily against the cement floor. "You're saying people only tune in to news they know they're going to agree with?"
"Bingo," said Pete. — Barbara Kingsolver

Your Honor, I am in a difficult position. The news media has already executed me and buried me ... If anyone is hypnotized, the people are hypnotized by the lies being told to them ... There is no attorney in the world who can represent me as a person. I have to do it myself. — Charles Manson

I've been in several situations where police officers and district attorneys have had the cooperation of people in the news media without either endangering the reporter or compromising their sources. — Edwin Meese

I turned on Fox News and jumped when I saw that they had one of those things in their studio. "Are you people crazy?" I screamed at the television. "Get out of there. Somebody shoot it!" Then I realized I was watching Special Report and had mistaken Charles Krauthammer for a zombie. — Ian McClellan

I like to tell people that I have the best job in the media. All I do is hang around with heroes. I do that every week for my 'War Stories' documentary series - and when FOX News wants - I go off and cover the young Americans we send to places like Afghanistan or Iraq. — Oliver North

Unfortunately, mainstream news has become infotainment, sharing more in common with the entertainment industry than with traditional journalism. Gossip, characterizations and injections of drama are subtly infused with facts, altering the truth in a similar way to how dramatists twist true stories to create greater excitement. — Lance Morcan

In the act of watching the television news, audiences cross the globe, one moment viewing a scene in a wide aerial shot, the next moment seeing an emotional close up of a victim's face. By extending the physical senses to impossible dimensions, media provide audiences a near metaphysical adventure. — James Houran

The COUNTRY is controlled by LAWS>
LAWS are controlled by POLITICIANS>
POLITICIANS are controlled by VOTERS>
VOTERS are controlled by PUBLIC OPINION>
PUBLIC OPINION is controlled by the MEDIA (News, Hollywood, Internet ... ) & EDUCATION
so. whoever controls MEDIA & EDUCATION, controls the COUNTRY. — William J. Federer

I do a lot of reading of news so I can be smarter, and I do a lot of watching TV news so I can know why Americans aren't very smart. Then I can point out the hypocrisy of politicians or the media. — Lizz Winstead

Nowadays myths can be practically momentary: transmitted throughout the world by 24-hour news and the internet, they spread virally, entering the minds of tens and hundreds of millions of people in minutes or hours. Are these true myths, or mass-manufactured fantasies? At times they can be both. In recent years images of resistance to tyranny have been relayed around the world by mass media, many of them captured on mobile phones by the resisters themselves. The myths of revolution that moved the resisters were reinforced, for a time, by the media that make the news. But myths survive for only as long as they are enacted by those who accept them. As popular uprisings go through their normal sequence of rebellion, anarchy and renewed — John N. Gray

[...] identify influential writers and news sources (including those with strong biases) and monitor what they are saying. This can help you understand how groups talk about events and issues. — Rachel Hilary Brown

The American people don't believe politicians. They don't believe business leaders or Hollywood celebrities or athletes or other supposed role models. And they certainly don't believe the news media. — John Yarmuth

Television news is akin to audible wallpaper. — George F. Will

Samuel FB Morse's SECOND question over the telegraph was, "Have you any news? — Harold Holzer

Media has the ability to make good seem evil and evil seem good. — Duncan William Gibbons

Do you remember that piece of footage on the local news, just as the first tower comes down, woman runs in off the street into a store, just gets the door closed behind her, and here comes this terrible black billowing, ash, debris, sweeping through the streets, gale force past the window ... that was the moment, Maxi. Not when 'everything changed.' When everything was revealed. No grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness and death. Showing us exactly what we've become, what we've been all the time."
"And what we've always been is ... ?"
"Is living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who's paying for it, who's starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs ... planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There's no uninnocent dead. — Thomas Pynchon

The point is that instead of a monolithic brick of printed content - delivered more or less unchanged to all subscribers - social media offers news that is personalized and nimble. — Ryan Holmes

Working with lots of old media clients, I've had a front-row seat on the ascension of new social players and the decline of traditional news outlets. And it's clear to me that old media has an awful lot to learn from social media, in particular in five key areas: relevance, distribution, velocity, monetization, and user experience. — Ryan Holmes

Subjective storytelling is now almost as common in the news media as it is in feature films, TV dramas, novels or theater shows. Journalists at their worst are self-centered storytellers who either knowingly or unknowingly bend truths into stories that match their personal beliefs or those of their employers. — Lance Morcan

It is almost superfluous to say that there is no such thing as a free and independent press among the mainstream news media today. In fact, the major media more resembles a propaganda machine than it does a free press. — Chuck Baldwin

Does nothing new ever happen in this fucking country? — Brad McKinniss

I am an unrepentant tweetaholic. I use the communications service all day long to discover news, interesting tidbits and, of course, to flack the work of our tech and media news site, Re/code. — Kara Swisher

Naturally, people - especially in America - live in the moment and, given the "crisis" orientation of cable news, think that [the 2000s are] the worst period the country has ever gone through. Not really. — Ivan Eland

At News Corporation, we have a history of challenging media orthodoxies. — Rupert Murdoch

Jamie Kilstein and Allison Kilkenny have created an important political radio show that balances humor and unreported news. At a time when media conglomerates dominate the airwaves, independent media like Citizen Radio is vital to national discourse. — Noam Chomsky

Black America surely faces an existential crisis, but not the one imagined in the condescending news media - of somehow getting non-black America to be more just and generous. The truth is, we've already been through that, and there is nothing left to do. We're out of 'affirmative actions' of all kinds. — James Howard Kunstler

The bigotry question goes both ways. There's a lot more anti-Christian bigotry today than there is concerning the other side. None of it gets covered by the news media. — Newt Gingrich

Nowadays, truth is the greatest news. The mass media are the wholesalers, the peer groups, the retailers of the communications industry. — David Riesman

People say the media is feeding the public's hunger for celebrity news, but that's the drug pusher's mentality. I don't think anybody would be pining for news about Angelina Jolie's babies if it weren't being given to them in the first place. — Patti Smith

When there is no news, we will give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were. — David Brinkley

I'm not one of these people who are disheartened that the universe is expanding. But as news and data breed and the crowded channels grow ever noisier, I do feel that the space is ever increasing between me and it, whatever it might be. — Rivka Galchen

Look, cell phone geolocation data shows very few clustering anomalies for this hour and climate. And that's holding up pretty much across all major metro areas. It's gone down six percentage points since news of the Karachi workshop hit the Web, and it's trending downward. If people are protesting, they aren't doing it in the streets." He circled his finger over a few clusters of dots. "Some potential protest knots in Portland and Austin, but defiance-related tag cloud groupings in social media put us within the three-sigma rule - meaning roughly sixty-eight percent of the values lie within one standard deviation of the mean. — Daniel Suarez

The left controls academia, the culture, and the news media. — Monica Crowley

The rise of a ubiquitous Internet, along with 24-hour news channels has, in some sense, had the opposite effect from what many might have hoped such free and open access to information would have had. It has instead provided free and open access, without the traditional media filters, to a barrage of disinformation. — Lawrence M. Krauss

The bad news for journalists today is that the media, however seriously people who are in the public eye take it, is not taken as seriously as it once was - by the public. — Alastair Campbell

Our stable and eternal verities are being challenged. There's a kind of postmodern breakdown in journalism. The breadth of information sources and the speed of transmission are growing; but the traditional gravity of news has eroded. -Jin Yongquan — Judy Polumbaum

The public's dilemma is to know how to consume the news with an ability to extract opinion from the simple facts and evidence... The best solution to the fact/opinion dilemma is to acquire more diverse information across the ideological and geological divide. If you find yourself relying on one source of information for the news, whether right or left, you are likely to be exposed to more opinion that reinforces rather than challenges your own. — Nancy Snow

There is no news media. There's simply a bunch of people on television and in newspapers who are ranking members of the Democrat Party. — Rush Limbaugh

The era of manufacturing consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news. Soon media newsrooms will drop the pretence, and start hiring theatre directors instead of journalists. — Arundhati Roy

So I switch to my MacBook and make my rounds: news sites, blogs, tweets. I scroll back to find the conversations that happened without me during the day. When every single piece of media you consume is time-shifted, does that mean it's actually you that's time-shifted? — Robin Sloan

The news is glorified gossip. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Frightening media messages ... pervade the news business, which really ought to be called "the bad news business" for its preoccupation with disaster and destruction. In broadcast journalism, killing is almost always covered, while kindness is almost always ignored. The more alarming a news item is, the more attention it receives. — Michael Medved

I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories. — Dave Barry

The owners and top managers of most news media organizations tend to be conservative and Republican. This is hardly surprising. The shareholders and executives of multi-billion-dollar corporations are not very interested in undermining the free enterprise system, for example, income from offended advertisers. These owners and managers ultimately decide which reporters, newscasters, and editors to hire or fire, promote or discourage. Journalists who want to get a head, therefore, may have to come to terms with the policies of the people who own and run media businesses. — Edward S. Greenberg

I used to think the most important thing for a reporter was to be where the news is and be the first to know. Now I feel a reporter should be able to effect change. Your reporting should move people and motivate people to change the world. Maybe this is too idealistic. Young people who want to be journalists must, first, study and, second, recognize that they should never be the heroes of the story..A journalist must be curious, and must be humble.
Zhou Yijun — Judy Polumbaum

Newspapers take peoples' tragedies and force the world to experience all of it. — Rebecca McNutt

In a society where dirt sells, for every good story told as it is, you will hear the whole of that day's 10 bad stories sensationalized; although in reality, it could be that 100 good deeds happened that day which went unsung. — Criss Jami