Press
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- Your job is to have a successful conversation with the American people.
- In emerging democracies like Russia, in authoritarian states like Iran or even Yugoslavia, journalists play a vital role in civil society. In fact, they form the very basis of those new democracies and civil societies.
- Once in a while you have to bite the hand that reads you.
- What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.
- What has changed is the media's sense of their ability to be responsible arbiters. I think they feel fearful. I think there's this whole idea now that there's a liberal media conspiracy, and I think they feel if they express any authority or judgment, which is what I imagine is editorial control, they will be vilified
- Conflict, when used as a device, makes for good television and bad journalism.
- Everything that anyone says is immediately spun. And I mean spun in a political sense, but also in the sense of a washing machine, so that the meaning really gets bled out.
- What Americans don't care much about is the piffle we put on TV these days, what they don't care about is boring, irrelevant, badly told stories, and what they really hate is the presumption that they're too stupid to know the difference.
- It is easy to get used to the morning news, habituated. But don't. The morning news is yours to alter.
- It’s a free country, but the noisiest people get the coverage.
- The media is more combative an enterprise than ever before?combative with the White House, newspapers literally fighting for their economic lives every day. You have outlets of ideological agendas in the briefing room on both sides who ask questions that fuel the debate.
- The media’s modern panopticon has an awful way of reducing us all to the worst thing we’ve ever done.