Aaron McGruder Quotes

All of journalism is a shrinking art. So much of it is hype. The O.J. Simpson story is a landmark in the decline of journalism.

I've found out how overwhelming the media is and the way it drills things into your head, it's almost like a mind control. If I could control prople's minds, I'd like to put something useful in.

Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.

There's a lot more people out there than you would think who cannot differentiate between TV and reality. I do think there's a lot of people out there who think I'm a nasty human being.

Let's be real: It's just TV; it's just entertainment.

You know it's always amazed me - I think the most startling thing that's happened in the last couple of decades is that there is no sort of objective reporting anymore.

That's the scary part about TV, how you'll feel about it in six years.

I mean the idea of this is that it's a good thing for the public to hear interviews like this and that there will be an inevitable amount of fewer interviews if people that the press talks to wind up thinking, well, it's not really a CBS correspondent.

The impact of T.V. on our lives in general gets most things out of proportion.

Just watching TV as a kid, for a long time I thought, as a young kid, obviously when I was, like, 4 or 5, I thought that people lived in the television.

There's a TV element to everything in my eyes.

As to the journalist himself, it is clear that to get a living he must write to order, that is, he must write in accordance with the views of his paper, in so far as he writes at all on current topics.

I don't tell Rupert Murdoch who to endorse.

People get ideas of how to live or not to live from what you do on television.

TV has changed everything.

I'm a person who watches TV all the time - all the time; I love TV. And I really think that the media heavily influences how we as a society behave towards each other. And one of the things that I find to be lacking on television are positive images of diversity.

I, for one, believe TV is something you can do without - it colours the way you look at things and people. It's not the best exposure for children, growing up.

Sometimes you wonder if television is really affecting the culture.

So often on CNN, there's a world-class journalist interviewing campaign rejects and ideologues and silly, craven people who do not care about informing people, that aren't there to help people understand what's going on in the news.

The impact of the Vietnam War on TV made everyone recognize the importance of visual media.

By their subjugation of the press, the political powers in America have conferred on themselves the greatest of political blessings -- Gyges' ring of invisibility. And they have left the American people more deeply baffled by their own country's politics than any people on earth. Our public realm lies steeped in twilight, and we call that twilight news.'

I never look at the newspaper in the morning. That's the worst thing you can do with your brain.

If you look at the New York Times, it says X; if you look at the Washington Post, it says the same thing. And if you turn on any television newscast it's the same thing you already heard, that's research. And that's one of the ways it's done. Authority ends up being imputed simply because of volume. I mean, all of these different news organizations reporting the exact same thing.

Is it really the right of the media to dictate to the president whom he will allow in his press conferences? That's tetchier. And then there is the added issue of whether it would be a service to their readers, and the country at large, for, say, the Washington Post to take itself out of the room -- meaning they don't have the ability to ask important questions the president is obliged to answer? I think that would be a mistake.

Sure enough, as merger has followed merger, journalism has been driven further down the hierarchy of values in the huge conglomerates that dominate what we see, read and hear. And to feed the profit margins journalism has been directed to other priorities than "the news we need to know to keep our freedoms"