Media Priorities Quotes

TV is all about hair. And then skin. And then clothing. And then it's about your voice. And finally the report, what you're actually saying. And 99 times out of 100, it never gets past the hair.

In the age of television, image becomes more important than substance.

I think that the media spends far too much time [on personalities].

I got overwhelmed by the magnitude of the celebrity culture in America. My background is as a news journalist, and newsrooms in the US are shrinking - investigation teams are being terminated or shrunk on newspapers all around the country. The one aspect that's expanded is coverage of celebrity culture.

For most folks, no news is good news; for the press, good news is not news.

Cable news is more titillating to talk about who's up and who's down and all that nonsense as opposed to what's actually done.

I don't know that it's a lack of creativity so much as it is , a lack of resources. And maybe a little bit of a lack of will but when you look at what fills every hour, let's just take CNN as an example, not because I think they're particularly egregious, but, they're sort of the ongoing hour, hour, hour. Why do they give us bulletins every single day on the latest poll? Very easy to cover a poll, right?

It seems a waste, to me, for the sake of getting more colorful news, to send these men, who are not in any way concerned with the war [Spanish Civil War] which is going on and the principles at stake, into such positions of danger. Three men, two Americans and an Englishman, have died, and with apparent pride a formal announcement is made to the effect that we should realize what dangers correspondents go through to give us the news. To be sure, these men, not only go willingly, but often are anxious for the assignment. Personally, I would prefer to have those three men alive and a little less accurate and colorful news, and I am quite sure the majority of the people in the United States feel the same way. If men must die, let it be for their own convictions, not because they are sent out so we may read or see something more startling in our newspapers and newsreels.

The sports page records people's accomplishments, the front page usually records nothing, but man's failures.

When you talk about President Trump, the cable networks turned over so many hours of prime time to him. Why? Because he was entertaining, but also because it drove ratings. And that is different from what the news media is supposed to focus on.

The press concentrates on a divorce an actor's going through and they ignore the good performances he gives, or the causes that he works for.

The idea that media is there to educate us, or to inform us, is ridiculous because that's about tenth or eleventh on their list.

The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there's a major explosion.

I'm really going to do my homework. I'm going to be down there on the practice tee finding out if a guy's wife beat him up the night before, important stuff like that. Stuff that people want to know.

Why are we so obsessed with celebrity culture? We have front-page news about divorces instead of front-page news about global warming, about women being abused, about children being abused. We're going on a downward spiral.

I like to talk on TV about those things that aren't worth writing about.

The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science, the very latest controversies, are worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like 'General Relativity still governing planetary orbits' or 'Phlogiston theory remains false'? By the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline.

How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion.

Television makes so much at its worst that it can't afford to do its best.

I have been offered films as well, but it's better to do good television shows rather than a small role in a film.

More people pay attention to fiction and to narrative than pay attention to journalism. That's quite sad. More people pay attention to television than to prose. That's equally sad, if not more so.

We give the podium to a lot of people who shouldn't have the podium. The message that's delivered the loudest and in the most entertaining way is the one that we're going to put on because that's what we want. We want ratings more than we want to deliver information. That's just where the culture's gotten.

The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context.

Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.

TV tends to laud the person with the perfect one-liner rather than the one with the better idea.