Infotainment Quotes

I love what news has become. It's no longer based on facts, it's based on entertainment.

Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.

I find it interesting, the different rules that apply to journalism and drama, even though journalism has become more and more about entertainment, and entertainment has become more and more about journalism.

Americans are used to being pandered to and spoon-fed everything. In a culture that needs caffeine-free cherry chocolate diet Coke, you'd best deliver information with entertainment.

News and entertainment are getting dangerously intertwined.

Probably the TV show I've watched the most is 'How It's Made' on the History Channel. I could watch 24 hours of 'How It's Made' and never get bored.

What I meant when I say that the media are bots, I don't want anybody misunderstand this. I'm watching CNN and one of their infobabes is doing this report on Al Franken questioning [Jeff] Sessions during the confirmation hearings. I'm convinced - and they played an edited version of it. It was edited by somebody to make it look like it was something other than what it was, and I'm convinced this infobabe hasn't the slightest clue.

Why don't you put that in the headline: 'He Only Did Three With Doris!' Set a lot of people straight.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

I think the relentless tide of celebrity stuff on the telly is getting pretty tedious.

Journalism has become a sort of competitive screeching: what is trivial but noisy and immediate takes precedence over important matters that develop over time.

People say to me all the time, "I get my news from your show." And that isn't the way they should get their news. But the choice is not between getting their news the right way and getting their news from my show. The choice is that they won't get any at all unless you give it to them in an entertaining package.

Journalism is straying into entertainment.

Entertainment and information work well together.

Learning and entertaining can go hand-in-hand.

We are inflicting opinion in our newscasts like never before. That was never done and never taught in our journalism classes.

I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed.

Most of us here in the media are what I call infotainers...Rush Limbaugh is what I call a disinfotainer. He entertains by spreading disinformation.

What passes for news is just morbid speculation or cartoonish screaming, followed by diaper commercials.

In general, when I watch cable news during the day, it's frustrating because it reminds me of a game show. If I want to watch 'The Price is Right,' I'll watch 'The Price is Right.'

Why don't you compare me to Sally Jessy Raphael?

Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine.

In the battle of substance over flash, few to none of the Al Jazeera correspondents are recognizable to U.S. audiences. Many have foreign names and accents; none have best-selling books atop the list or can be heard pounding their shoes on the nightly infotainment podium.

A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.

Foreign news is considered an expletive. Thoughtfully written analysis is out, 'live pops' are in. 'Action Jackson' is the cry. Hire lookers, not writers. Do powder puff, not probing interviews. Stay away from controversial subjects. Kiss ass, move with the mass, and for heaven and rating's sake, don't make anybody mad- - certainly not anybody you're covering, and especially not the mayor, the governor, the senator, the president or the vice-president or anybody in a position of power. Make nice, not news.