Quotes About Media

It was also the content. Trump sold hate, violence, xenophobia, racism, and ignorance, which oddly enough had long been permissible zones of exploration for American television entertainment. And the news media was becoming more and more indistinguishable from entertainment media. Meanwhile

Get your liver ready: the second GOP debate is upon us S

The final insult to all of this is that when Trump secured the nomination, media companies looked down at their bottom lines and realized that, via the profits they made during his run—Trump is "good for business," CBS president Les Moonves infamously confessed—they had been made accomplices to the whole affair. —

In fact, the tension between the sheer quantity of horrifying news and your real-world impotence to do much about it is part of our consumer strategy. We create the illusion that being informed is a kind of action in itself. So to wash that guilt out—to eliminate the shame and discomfort you feel over doing nothing as the world goes mad—you'll keep tuning in.

So long as we remain a bitterly divided two-party state, we'll never want for TV villains.

Who we hate just depends on what channel we watch.

Democrats and Republicans spent a year writing themselves a pork-packed Christmas list on the scale of the Iraq invasion, full of monster expenditures, including money for dangerous new forms of nukes. Yet the headline when Trump signed the freaking thing was that he forgot to mention the senator whose name was attached to the legislation.

Images of poor, inarticulate people are disturbing to audiences, especially upscale ones (read: people with disposable incomes who can respond to advertising). That's why we don't show poverty on TV unless we're laughing at it (Honey Boo Boo) or chasing it in squad cars (Cops).

In his book, Cohen referenced an old joke: What do pro wrestling and the U.S. Senate have in common? Both are dominated by overweight white guys pretending to hurt each other. He said, "The intellectual level of cable news is one step above pro wrestling." Cohen wrote that over a decade ago. Today the news is at the level of pro wrestling. This is one reason we have a WWE performer in the White House.

one story everyone can safely cover is how much we hate each other. There's no institutional or commercial taboo that story violates.

One additional bizarre Trump-inspired change to reporting that took place in 2016 involved polls: we increasingly ignored data favorable to Trump and pushed surveys suggesting a Clinton landslide. The Times ran a piece in October pronouncing the race essentially over, telling us to expect a "sweeping victory at every level" for Clinton.

A Maddow–O'Donnell handoff is always drearily about anti-Republican solidarity, just as a Tucker Carlson–Sean Hannity baton-pass, while less formalized, never leaves the anti-Democrat theme for a second. We are always at war with each other. It never stops, not for one second. This is a profound expression of political instability at the top of our society.

Two data points stood out after 2016. One involved those polls that showed confidence in the media dipping to all-time lows. The other involved unprecedented ratings. People believed us less, but watched us more.

In 2016 especially, news reporters began to consciously divide and radicalize audiences. The cover was that we were merely "calling out" our divisive new president, Donald Trump. But from where I sat, the press was now working in collaboration with Trump, acting in his simplistic mirror image, creating a caricatured oppositional demographic and feeding it content. As Trump rode to the White House, we rode to massive profits. The only losers were the American people

Does anyone seriously believe that powerful people would allow truly dangerous ideas to be broadcast on TV? The news today is a reality show where you're part of the cast: America vs. America, on every channel.

Intellectual diversity" in a major news outlet means "someone from both parties." You will connect with one or the other. It doesn't matter which one.

By February 2016, when Trump was already steaming toward the nomination, I began to realize the extent to which he'd conned all of us. He first used the media's financial desperation to secure free coverage, but when the attention became not just negative but condemnatory, he used that, too. He

We are now eating into the profits of the entertainment business. Completing a decades-long slide, the news has become a show, and not just in campaign years, but always.

To make money, we've had to train audiences to consume news in a certain way. We need you anxious, pre-pissed, addicted to conflict. Moreover we need you to bring a series of assumptions every time you open a paper or turn on your phone, TV, or car radio.

News companies don't just want you feeling ashamed of not knowing the news. That's desperate marketing, ring-around-the-collar tactics. They want you so emotionally invested that your psyche falls apart if the wrong story appears on screen. We want you awake at night, teeth chattering, panicking about things over which you have no control.

It boggles my mind that people think they're practicing real political advocacy by watching major corporate TV, be it Fox or MSNBC or CNN. Does anyone seriously believe that powerful people would allow truly dangerous ideas to be broadcast on TV?

the two most taboo lines in all media in America are I don't know and I don't care.

Listening in anger to your favorite political program, you will act like a person who is shaking a fist at power, when in fact you've been neutralized as an independent threat, reduced to a prop in a show.

We know you know the news we show you is demeaning, disgusting, pointless, and not really intended to inform. But we assume you'll be too embarrassed to admit you spend hours every day poring over content specifically designed to reenforce your point of view. In fact, you'll consume twice as much, rather than admit you don't like to be challenged.