News Selection Quotes

Not every item of news should be published: rather those who control news policies endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose.

The mass media in the days of newspapers and television it's hard to be able to find a story that's about just what you're interested in at the time you're interested in it.

I don't look for good-news stories or bad-news stories.

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.

TV news is what you want it to be, and if you want it to be different, take a look at what you watch.

The power is to set the agenda. What we print and what we don't print matter a lot.

'The Washington Post' doesn't have to report on what I post on Twitter. CNN doesn't have to report on what I post on Twitter. All kinds of media outlets - they don't have to report on anything that I post on Twitter. Just like they don't have to report on all kinds of other things that other people post on Twitter.

So great is society's demand for information that we can no longer say that all the news gathered is worthy of airing. Much of it is not.

But you will hardly ever read about them. Why? Because once again, the media has predetermined what is not worthy of coverage, even when the news item is something as uninteresting as the cosmic origin of every element in your body.

Suicides? Heart attacks? The papers didn't seem interested. The world was full of ways to die, too many to cover. Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.

I always turn to the sports pages first, which records people's accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man's failures.

All the news that fits we print.

It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.

Ever noticed that no matter what happens in one day, it exactly fits in the newspaper?

The coverage of Central America in recent months points up one of the ugly truths about the American press: the better the news, the less of it you get. As the war began to turn against the Communist guerillas in El Salvador, there was a palpable dip in the attention paid to it.

Of course the media loves stuff like that so they find this one Rockette. It's like you can have 10,000 people at a rally for [Donald] Trump and 200 people outside, and the 200 people outside make the news.

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

News isn't just what happens. It's what a fairly small group of people decide is news.

Try pitching a story of happiness to your editors, and their toes are going to curl up.

A newspaper may somewhat arrogantly assert that it prints "all the news that's fit to print." But no newspaper yet has been moved to declare at the end of each edition, "That's the way it is," as Walter Cronkite does.

Journalism and the questions of journalistic ethics, and why certain stories are put on the air, when, how and for what reasons, are big questions in our culture and society.

If I want to spend the rest of my life reading one day's output of information, which is about what it would take, OK fine. But I personally prefer calibration from an aggregator or newspaper, where the No. 1 story is one they consider important, [and] they're usually right.

All the good things that are happening in America don't get reported on a lot.

If a theology student in lowa should get up at a PTA luncheon in Sioux City and attack the President's military policy, my guess is that you would probably find it reported somewhere the next morning in the New York Times. But when 300 Congressmen endorse the President's policy, the next morning it is apparently not considered news fit to print.

Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.