Michael Bloomberg Quotes

The legions of reporters who cover politics don't want to quit the clash and thunder of electoral combat for the dry duty of analyzing the federal budget. As a consequence, we have created the perpetual presidential campaign.

I have serious doubts about the value of debates in a presidential election. They tend to be a test of reaction time rather than a genuine exposition of the participants' philosophies and programs

Many newspapers have become players as well as spectators in the political debate.

The larger meaning here is that mainstream journalists simply cannot talk about things that the two parties agree on; this is the black hole of American politics.

Can freedom be maintained under the most severe attack it has ever known? I think it can be. And I think in the final analysis it depends upon what we do here.

If somebody asks me where I stand, I tell them. And that's not a way to get elected, generally. Nobody's going to elect me president of the United States. What I'd like to do is to be able to influence the dialogue. I'm a citizen

Presidential nomination debates have turned into mud wrestling instead of expositions of the candidates’ views.

The tone of a portion of the press of the country toward public men, and especially toward political opponents, is degrading, all forms of coarse and noisy slander being apparently considered legitimate weapons to employ against men of the opposite party or faction.

Many people hardly ever see a politician as a person anymore. Instead, a politician is a shadow they watch on television, not knowing whether he is speaking impromptu or reading a text written for him by anonymous advisers or experts from a screen hidden behind the cameras. Citizens no longer perceive their politician as a living human being, for they never have and will never see him that way. They see only his image, created for them by TV, radio and newspaper commentators. It also happens, rather often, that politicians do not actually talk to each other but only to one another's shadows as they appear in the media.

I really do not like having media moderators. Lincoln and Douglass didn't have moderators. Let the candidates ask one another questions.

There is a permanent war between journalists and the political classes.

Let’s throw the economists out and use common sense instead.

A journalists's job is not to be balanced. It is to be accurate.

I never had a political thought in my life until they asked me to join the Richard Nixon Presidential Campaign.

The media increase the political nastiness while distancing voters from those clashes. Citizens become spectators. ­Headline-­driven news emphasizes the extremes, the fights, the hysteria, the sensational. Political reporters, trying to appear objective by quoting two opposing sides to almost every story, mostly sharpen the differences, slighting any centrist position.

The press creates a caricature.

The media has not done a great job in fulfilling their role - journalism's role in a democracy is to provide information on profoundly important subjects so we're an informed citizenry.

I've covered a lot of presidential campaigns.

I read the 'Guardian,' because it's a bit like having an argument with a mate. We mostly have the same sensibilities, but where we disagree, it's infuriating.

It might not be wise for a sometime political journalist to admit this, but the 2016 campaign doesn't seem like fun to me.

As opposed to journalists, politicians cannot make do with questions. They must also offer answers.

The back and forth between the press and government is essential to any good democracy.

Campaigns maybe encourage us to pay attention to attributes that maybe aren't that important in the presidency.

To change the media, you're gonna have to totally throw out every journalism school and get rid of everybody in every newsroom, and then you're gonna have to change the grade school and middle school and high school curriculum.

The press has met their Waterloo, and it's Obama.