Michelle Dean Quotes

Let's not kid ourselves. You pick up 'The Washington Post' and find O.J. Simpson on the front page; 'serious journalists' covered Anna Nicole Smith.

I am not anti-media at all. But the media, the news anywhere in the world, is based on drama.

The secret of a successful newspaper is to take one story each day and bang the hell out of it. Give the public what it wants to have and part of what it ought to have whether it wants it or not.

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.

What draws the press is conflict, corruption and scandal.

I think sometimes the recording of each act which has gone into the perpetration of some crime simply gives new suggestions to less fertile minds. I realize that crimes are "news," but I wonder if they could not be very briefly recorded, leaving out as much detail as possible and by doing so it might be easier for the arm of the law to proceed in unsolved crimes. The public is, of course, to blame, for apparently there is a curious fascination for many people in the reading of all these gruesome details. Is there no way that the public for its own protection can be induced to forego some of this particular type of reading matter?

The media is always looking for a story of one kind or another.

Whether you're talking about MSNBC or Fox or CNN, it's all about getting enough interest out there, sensationalizing the story in such a way that people are compelled to tune in.

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

All of journalism is a shrinking art. So much of it is hype. The O.J. Simpson story is a landmark in the decline of journalism.

The biases the media has are much bigger than conservative or liberal. They're about getting ratings, about making money, about doing stories that are easy to cover.

As an old creative industry full of cruelty and moral sense, British journalism once flourished on the imperative that people required the truth in order to survive. But people don't require that now. They want sensation and they want it for nothing.

Everybody wants a sensational story.

Journalism never admits that nothing much is happening.

There are two sayings that are familiar in every news room across the country: 1) sex sells; 2) if it bleeds it leads.

I think journalism gets measured by the quality of information it presents, not the drama or the pyrotechnics associated with us.

I don't believe that there's such a thing as objectivity in much of journalism, but I think there is a serious effort to and a regard for facts and into taking that stuff seriously is very important to the public discourse and it's very important to democracy.

The good news does not make the front pages. The bad news does make the front pages.

Sound bite hearings and sound bite journalism feed off each other.

Journalists follow authority as sharks follow a liner, dining on the scraps that are thrown overboard.

Journalism is now not only reflecting what is happening, it is affecting what is happening. Governments all over the world watch CNN.

… yellow journalism

Every time I watch CNN, it feels like you're assigning me homework. Is Trump a Russian spy? I don't know. You tell me - I'm watching the news. It feels like I'm watching CNN watch the news. Just take an hour, figure out what you want to say, then go on the air.

The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain.

The public's appetite for what sensible newspapers call 'personality journalism' and what I call gossip is insatiable. It will never, ever stop growing because everybody dreams.