Gerard Baker Quotes

A crippling fallacy that characterizes our modern media is the idea that every event that rises to the level of news must connote some wider societal or political crisis that can only be remedied by government intervention. Tragedies, natural disasters, acts of unspeakable evil aren’t simply to be reported and explained for what they often are: the products of individual will or negligence, irremediable human malignity or some complex set of scientific interactions. Instead each event—from lethal accidents to vicious murders to Category 5 hurricanes—is immediately sorted into its prelabeled moral narrative file, each one full of similarly useful sententious parables. They become props in the larger drama that is being constantly written for us by the preachy puritans who now control most news organizations, convenient plot devices to illustrate the virtue of their cause and the malevolence of that of their critics.

I think everyone knows the news has become ridiculous. It's entertainment driven.

The good news does not make the front pages. The bad news does make the front pages.

The primary purpose of the media is to mobilize support for the controlling interests.

A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.

Television news is now entertainment, and the stories are being written by the people that have a special interest in them.

When the state or federal government control the education of all of our children, they have the dangerous and illegitimate monopoly to control and influence the thought process of our citizens.

News has become entertainment. Once that happens, a whole series of horrific events start to happen, whether it's the lack of dissemination of something that can inform you or something that actually negatively impacts society.

More and more, I find that the news reads like a particularly random game of Consequences.

The media dwells mostly on negativity.

I think the media are so hypocritical a lot of the time in the way they chastise something just so that they can print it again.

News and entertainment are getting dangerously intertwined.

The nation whose population depends on the explosively compressed headline service of television news can expect to be exploited by the demagogues and dictators who prey upon the semi-informed.

… yellow journalism

It’s a lot easier and cheaper to have thumbsuckers and pundits on television than it is to have reporters and news bureaus around the world.

The newspapers! Sir, they are the most villainous — licentious — abominable — infernal — Not that I ever read them — no — I make it a rule never to look into a newspaper.

Pundits, media companies and politicians have discovered that it is emotion, not reason, that wins votes and pulls in eyeballs. It’s fun and lucrative while it lasts, but the Greeks and Romans can tell you precisely what it does to a civilization in the long run.

The American media wants to pump you full of fear.

The media is always looking for a story of one kind or another.

I have never seen anyone at CNN ever say, 'Boy, here's how we're going to deal with this today to put this guy down and elevate this guy up.' I've never seen it.

I think the media is a fear-mongering operation. They love to rile their viewership up or to scare them.

Frankly, many Fox shows are running away from the news rather than reporting on it.

Asking the question whether the mainstream media has a liberal or conservative bias is like asking whether al Qaeda uses too much oil in their hummus. I might think they use a little bit too much oil; some people might think it's a little dry. But the problem with al Qaeda is they want to kill us. And the problem with the mainstream media is that it has these other biases that are much more important.

When Trump says fake news, he means journalism that makes points with which he disagrees, usually about him.

The junk food of political journalism...all reshuffle stories are crap.