Media Gatekeepers Quotes

Media gatekeepers - editors, publishers, film studios and the like - need to begin investing in talent behind the scenes, developing and resourcing marginalized voices to tell their own stories. At the end of the day, it's about the story and what will enable the audience to truly see, understand, and know the life and times of the subject.

But particularly when the media profess to strive toward objectivity, gatekeepers play a crucial role in helping people navigate the news to make educated political decisions.

A handful of us determine what will be on the evening news broadcasts, or, for that matter, in the New York Times or Washington Post or Wall Street Journal. Indeed it is a handful of us with this awesome power.And those [news stories] available to us already have been culled and re-culled by persons far outside our control.

I think at places like 'Slate' or the magazine where I work, there was a really poor record of hiring African-American writers. It was really that simple. And I think with the proliferation of the Internet and Internet media, it has been a little harder to maintain that gatekeeper position.

I'm tired of advertisers being the gatekeepers of what is and is not appropriate on news shows.

I am not asking for government censorship or any other kind of censorship. I am asking whether a kind of censorship already exists when the news that forty million Americans receive each night is determined by a handful of men responsible only to their corporate employers and filtered through a handful of commentators who admit to their own set of biases.

That's why editors and publishers will never be obsolete: a reader wants someone with taste and authority to point them in the direction of the good stuff, and to keep the awful stuff away from their door.

In so many of the other beats these days, there are these layers of public relations people that you have to go through to get to the newsmakers themselves.