Robert Scheer Quotes

There isn't as much passion and outrage in today's newspapers. That may be because of a corporate decision, but they've lost their personality.

The democratic approach to news is a very valuable thing. We're always going to be dependent on the quality of reporting of mainstream media.

Even the alternative weekly newspapers, traditionally a bastion of progressive thought and analysis, have been bought by a monopoly franchise and made a predictable shift to the right in their coverage of local news.

News, by and large, has been the purest of all the television mediums, or at least we've tried to keep it that way, and there constantly is the argument about the separation between church and state.

The freedom of the press throughout the world where the capitalists rule, is the freedom to buy up papers, the freedom to buy writers, to buy and manufacture public opinion in the interest of the capitalists.

I have tried to write about this matter without any improper bias, but of course we are all cowards about newspapers who tyrannize over us all.

There isn't much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.

PBS was not a left-wing ideology. I mean, Air America was, but PBS was not. But anybody who tells the truth is now branded and marginalized. The devolution of the American press began in 1986 when Ronald Reagan abolished the fairness doctrine.

We need ethical journalism. There is also capacity limitations in journalism.

There is no independent American print or TV media.

The papers, you know, they're always gonna just make stuff up. They think it's in the public interest.

It's one of the biggest fibs going that American newspapers are now being forced to give up their commitment to investigative reporting. Most of them gave up long ago as their greedy managements squeezed every cent out of the bottom line and turned their newsrooms into eunuchs.

A city with one newspaper, or with a morning and an evening paper under one ownership, is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.

A common criticism of establishment journalists entails comparing them to stenographers, on the ground that most of them do little more than mindlessly write down and uncritically repeat what government officials say.

Whenever it's suggested that our sponsors have some kind of influence or control of what we cover in some kind of censorship through financial pressure, it's rubbish. That's never happened.

The American people should be made aware of the trend toward monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of more and more power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands.

If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

The quality of life in America is dependent on the quality of the journalism. Most people don't realize that, but if you think about it, journalism is one of the pillars on which our society is perched.

It's very hard to find critics or a magazine today that will publish material that is genuinely independent and written without any concern about being cut off some distributor's list or not be invited or flown into screenings.

All the news that fits we print.

My contempt for the instruments of public information—particularly the press, is unlimited ...

The political misrepresentation of facts is one of the incidents of a free press in every free country.

[Drew] Pearson and [Walter] Winchell are a high price to pay for freedom of the press, but I guess you've got to do it.

The few ... being closely combined ... inploy no printers [journalists and writers] but those that will adhear strictly to their vuies and interests.