Quotes from Howard Kurtz

I don't like either party. I believe even the best politicians can be self-serving hypocrites.

Many people no longer believe the polls or the fact-checking columns trumpeted by news organizations. Conservatives have complained for decades about media bias, but many liberals now join in the indictment

His staff had a name for when Trump utterly ignored their collective advice: defiance disorder.

Harvard researchers found that major media coverage of his first hundred days was 80 percent negative, a figure that jumped to 93 percent negative for CNN and NBC, and 91 percent for CBS. (On Fox, it was 52 percent negative, 48 percent positive.)

its ombudsman Liz Spayd, while praising the paper's reporting, worried about "a slide toward coverage that can be misperceived as rooting for Trump's demise." That is sometimes how it looked. (The paper soon abolished her job.)

This country didn't get fucked up in 100 days and it's not going to get fixed in 100 days.

As paradoxical as it sounds, negative coverage helps Trump because it bonds him to people who also feel disrespected by the denizens of the mainstream press.

It was the most catastrophic media failure in a generation.

I may have been quicker than most of my colleagues to grasp that the country was fed up with the empty promises and utter dysfunction of Washington. I was sensitive to the fact that many Americans we blithely categorize as working class had lousy jobs, were bouncing between jobs, or worried about losing their jobs, and were brimming with resentment. I didn't dismiss them as racist yahoos.

Spicer felt the media were no longer being held accountable for their mistakes.

Every president gets pounded by the press. But no president had ever been subjected to the kind of relentless ridicule, caustic commentary, and insulting invective that has been heaped on Donald Trump.

A common refrain among Trump's antagonists in the press is that they must resist normalizing his presidency. But in the process, they have abnormalized journalism.

Donald Trump will not be president forever, but the media's reputation, badly scarred during these polarizing years, might never recover.

Bannon thought these Game of Thrones stories were the sort of unadulterated gossip that White House correspondents liked, because they weren't terribly bright, had no grasp of history, and were functioning more like bloggers, aiming for quick hits on MSNBC.

he knew their lives would be easier if Trump stopped tweeting; but on balance he felt that Twitter was a positive tool for communicating his agenda.