Quotes About Media

In dealing with newspaper people, whether they are white or black, there is no way of getting their sympathy and support like that of actually knowing the individual men, of meeting and talking with them frequently and frankly, and of keeping them in touch with everything you do or intend to do.

The real trouble with the newspapers is that while they frequently exhibit the average man at his worst, they rarely show him at his best. In order to read the best about the average man we must still go to books or to magazines.

I have learned that it is pretty hard to keep anything from the newspapers that the newspapers think the public wants to know.

I don't listen to the radio to find out what's happened. I listen to it to find out how the happenings have been distorted.

Newspapers widen the sphere of our sympathies. They make their readers enter into the joys and sorrows of thousands of whom they would else know nothing, and for whom they would otherwise care nothing.

Wilde was not a fan of pundits. They came on television to either confirm your narrative or piss you off, and either way, that wasn't healthy for anyone.

Word about the shooting had somehow not yet made the papers, so most of the messages were mercifully client- rather than solace-related.

The great thing about the Internet: It gives everyone a voice. The bad thing about the Internet: It gives everyone a voice.

When I was an assistant producer on A Current Affair. I booked you as an expert on the Robert Blake murder trial.' He turned to the spectators and bowed deeply. 'So, ladies and gentlemen, we've established the fact that I'm a media whore. Touché.' Another smattering of laughter. 'Still, Ms. Tynes, are you trying to tell the court that law enforcement was in favor of your journalistic twaddle to the point of cooperation?

I now believe that television itself, the medium of sitting in front of a magic box that pulses images at us endlessly, the act of watching TV, per se, is mind crushing. It is soul deadening, dehumanizing, soporific in a poisonous way, ultimately brutalizing. It is, simply put so you cannot mistake my meaning, a bad thing.

Like television, motion pictures, and computers, [Stephen] King has replaced reading...the triumph of the genial King is a large emblem of the failures of American education.

It is a newspaper's duty to print the news and raise hell. Wilbur Storey

Any journalist who holds the office writes in a straitjacket.

As for me, I knew nothing except what I gathered from Time magazine and reading everything I could lay hands on at home

somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers.

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.

There's not a branch of publishing or broadcasting that doesn't depend in some way on advertising. It'd be like an aquarium without water. Why, ninety-five percent of the information that reaches you has already been preselected and paid for.

Certain kinds of information are like smoke: they work their way into people's eyes and minds whether sought out or not, and with no regard to personal preference.

What alternative is there to the media's "Us" versus "Them"? The danger is that if it is used to prop up this "righteous" position of "ours" all we will see from now on are ever more exacting and minute analyses of the "dirty" distortions in "their" thinking. Without some flexibility in our definitions we'll remain forever stuck with the same old knee-jerk reactions, or worse, slide into complete apathy.

I've become skeptical of the unwritten rule that just because a boy and girl appear in the same feature, a romance must ensue.

More and more, you're seeing television shows that are better than 99% of the movies out there. I mean, you watch something like the last couple of seasons of 'The Sopranos,' which is some of the most sophisticated writing I've ever seen filmed and some of the best filmmaking I've ever seen - and it's a TV show.

There have been a lot of stories written about me, some of them fantastically distorted.

We live in such a gullible world. Anything that's written, anything that's posted, anything picture that is interpreted one way is taken as truth.

Don't ever forget two things I'm going to tell you. One, don't believe everything that's written about you. Two, don't pick up too many checks.