Art Buchwald Quotes

Sound bite hearings and sound bite journalism feed off each other.

Journalism is now not only reflecting what is happening, it is affecting what is happening. Governments all over the world watch CNN.

Among journalists, there is a saying: 'If it bleeds, it leads.' This can result in some serious hustling - and some serious sloppiness - whenever a crime occurs. The public's longing to see and hear salacious details is, basically, endless.

Because of a mass media more interested in gossip and sensationalism than real issues, I would say a vast majority of the American public doesn't have a clue about how the Congress functions and what goes on.

The bias of the mainstream media is toward sensationalism, conflict, and laziness.

The biases the media has are much bigger than conservative or liberal. They're about getting ratings, about making money, about doing stories that are easy to cover.

The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if it were.

We live in a world where, for whatever reason, the conversations that tend to stick are the ones where 'if it bleeds, it leads.' But we've always been afraid of new technologies in spite of the fact that they've helped improve our lives in countless ways.

Journalism never admits that nothing much is happening.

Having been in the newspaper business for a long, long time, I often wonder, Why do we actually need to know about something like a bus crash in Bangladesh that has no effect on us at all? That can be nothing other than voyeurism.

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.

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

1952 was the last year that television covered a political event as if television weren't there.

Do something good and you won’t make page one. Find something bad and you might make page one.

Let’s get real. It does make a difference what children see on television.

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.

Whatever may be said about the power of the press, it is undeniable that it can set the entire public thinking and talking about any topic ...

As has been the case with almost every new technology, from the telegraph to television, the rise of the Internet fed false expectations that it would create a new, more democratic, interactive politics. But blogging’s harsh, unfettered nature has coarsened politics. The fact that so many bloggers are essentially anonymous allows them to spew rancor, rumor, lies, and obscenities. Increasingly, the ­MSM (mainstream ­media) ­appear by contrast staid, centrist, boring, even responsible. ­Deadlines—­once daily, now without limit in the age of the Internet—­demand a constant stream of stories, diluting the quality and upping the rhetorical ante in the effort to grab ­attention, In an ­ever-­escalating rhetorical spiral, political discussion in the media and the blogosphere becomes harsher, sleazier. At the same time, the stories that stand out are the sensational and polarizing ones rather than the constructive, ­bridge-­building ones. A variation of Gresham’s law applies: Just as bad money drives out the good, bad rhetoric and sleazy politics drive ­out—­or at least eclipse and ­obscure—­the ­good.

Every time I watch CNN, it feels like you're assigning me homework. Is Trump a Russian spy? I don't know. You tell me - I'm watching the news. It feels like I'm watching CNN watch the news. Just take an hour, figure out what you want to say, then go on the air.

If you've got a big star like O'Reilly, it does overshadow what the hard-news guys do during the day. That's the nature of television.

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

With all this dolling up and featuring of the news, it's getter harder and harder just to get the facts of the story.

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.

Almost everything I say, no matter how innocent my intentions are, seems to get sort of manipulated and sensationalized and turned into some ridiculous news story.