Ted Koppel Quotes

You know it's always amazed me - I think the most startling thing that's happened in the last couple of decades is that there is no sort of objective reporting anymore.

I never, ever have seen media this way. It's almost indescribable. Making up stories, refusing to run real stories. It's making themselves look like utter fools. There's no journalism, there is no media. There's pure, full-fledged advocacy here.

We take what's shown on television as the truth, and it isn't. News isn't even the truth on television. If you look up the definition of what news is, it isn't that what we're watching on the new - it's entertainment.

News isn't even the truth on television.

Conservatives watch Fox News and read 'Breitbart.' Liberals watch MSNBC and read 'HuffPost.' When we agree, it's the truth; when we differ, it's fake news.

It's CNN's bigger problem that CNN wants to deny reality. I, too, used to drink the Kool-Aid that it was a top journalism operation that reports without bias. Now that I'm outside the walls of traditional media, I know there is no such thing.

The term propaganda rings melodramatic and exaggerated, but a press that—whether from fear, careerism, or conviction—uncritically recites false government claims and reports them as fact, or treats elected officials with a reverence reserved for royalty, cannot be accurately described as engaged in any other function.

A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.

Journalists aren't supposed to be cheerleaders.

People think they're getting objective information, but they're not. They're getting news wrapped up in opinion.

I was trained as journalist never to use the word 'I,' never to put my own opinion there. In fact, if you had a dollar or a euro for every time I use the word 'I,' you would be a poor person. But this is not true in general. I like the idea of being able to stand away and make a judgement.

I guess the issue that I have with all the news organizations that have a political MO, if you will, attached to them is that they sometimes jump to conclusions about what this will mean. Get ahead of themselves.

I think a lot of people of my generation are discomfited by the assertion of neutrality in the mainstream media, this idea that they're the voice of God. I think it's just honest to say, yes, you know where I'm coming from but you can fact-check anything I say.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

The problem that I think is reasonable to assert about Fox and its coverage is that they make up stories out of whole cloth and then make a big deal out of them.

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

Ultimately journalism has changed... partisanship is very much a part of journalism now.

If it comes to be believed that we are simply a propaganda organ of some kind, as a lot of people believe about some of our competitors, that would be a problem.

The standards are being lowered, not just on the Internet, but in all of news and media.

Giving the same value to fiction as to fact in the interest of so-called fairness is to mislead the American people and the press has become party to that.

I heard that after you throw away a 'New York Times,' it takes over a hundred years for the lies to biodegrade.

God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.

Journalism, as practiced by some, has become something akin to professional wrestling—something to watch rather than believe.

The essence of American journalism is vulgarity divested of truth.