Al Franken Quotes

I think there is a mainstream media. CNN is mainstream media, and the main, ABC, CBS, NBC are mainstream media. And I think it's just essentially to make the point that we are largely in the center without particular axes to grind, without ideologies which are represented in our daily coverage, at least certainly not on purpose.

I think the media is dangerously close to creating their own product. They used to cover the product, which was whatever's happening.

I think there are a lot of reasons to be critical of the media in America.

I do find that the mainstream media oftentimes is what I would consider off base or has a bias.

The news media more and more considered the politicians to be props in their entertainment shows.

Yes, the mainstream media is painfully biased.

It's only because you can now watch cheerfully biased Fox News that you begin to realize how cheerlessly biased CNN really is - and always was. Or CBS. Or ABC. Or the BBC.

The U.S. corporate media, otherwise known as the "free press," is that hollow pillar on which contemporary American democracy rests.

The Big-Media collective, however, is slow, stupid and shackled by ideology. Reality must bite them before they’ll recognize it, much less report it.

Look, I think liberals have reasonable gripes with Fox News. It does lean to the right, primarily in its opinion programming but also in its story selection (which is fine by me) and elsewhere. But it's worth remembering that Fox is less a bastion of ideological conservatism and more a populist, tabloidy network.

The news media in general are liberals.

I don't want the news to be patriotic. I don't want to see flags on the lapels of the anchors. I don't want any of that.

Anybody who has had the pleasure of reading an article about themselves in the press knows that, on the whole, there is a huge amount of inaccuracy, value judgment and the use of a crowbar to insert editorial bias that reflects the current political leaning of that particular paper.

The bias of the media is neither liberal nor conservative but negative.

Past occurrences have generally shown that there hasn’t been satisfaction from politicians in the manner they were covered [by the press.]

Many newspapers have become players as well as spectators in the political debate.

I think the media, by and large, if you look at surveys over the years, has never been conservative-leaning by any measure.

Being beyond politics, I am able to examine the role of the media without worrying about the indignant harrumphing that emanates from many journalists and commentators when you do so.

There is no news media. There's simply a bunch of people on television and in newspapers who are ranking members of the Democrat Party.

You think that the CNN hosts can aggressively challenge government officials? I don't think so. It doesn't look that way at all. And of course, when you get to Fox News, they're a whole different animal: they're purely propaganda.

Most of the outrage comes from not the public, but from the media, the press and writers.

There's no question that the media today has a relationship with Barack Obama that... I can't say it's unique, because the modern-day media is the Democrat Party and their objective is to advance the Democrat Party agenda as well as try to discredit any opposing agenda, which would be us and the Republicans. But the relationship they've got with Obama is above and beyond that.

Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics.

People continually ask me, "Why does the media do what it does? Why are they so obviously self-destructive? Why are they so obviously predictable? Why is the media so obviously biased? Do they not see how other people see?" No, they don't. But then again, they don't care, folks.

My experience is that journalists report on the nearest-cliche algorithm, which is extremely uninformative because there aren't many cliches, the truth is often quite distant from any cliche, and the only thing you can infer about the actual event was that this was the closest cliche. It is simply not possible to appreciate the sheer awfulness of mainstream media reporting until someone has actually reported on you. It is so much worse than you think.