Jacob Weisberg Quotes

I know politics; I know the media.

But in the right-wing media, they do have a right-wing bias. And they also have an agenda. So their agenda is: we're an adjunct of the Republican Party, and we're going push that agenda every day, and, as you say, brand these stories that help further the right-wing cause.

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

… there was partisanship in the newspapers …. Newspapers were not neutral. Newspapers were the political vehicle of a particular group and sometimes they were the cultural vehicle as well. It is also important to keep in mind that some of the newspaper editors were very friendly with … political leaders

You can debate when the conservative movement became a racket - I nominate 1996, the year Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes created Fox News Channel to monetize right-wing outrage - but there is no doubt it has long since passed that point.

As a media consultant to Republican presidents, Ailes proved a deft manipulator of racial fear. But it was in building Fox News that he found his calling.

Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we're discovering we work for Fox.

Conservatives don't want to read good, smart books. They mostly want to read Fox and talk radio hosts writing about presidents.

The greatest propaganda coup of the American Right has been to convince its citizens that we are in the grip of a liberal conspiracy.

Criticizing Fox News has nothing to do with criticizing the press. Fox News is not a news organization. It is the de facto leader of the GOP, and it is long past time that it is treated as such by the media, elected officials and the public.

Because I have an opinion, I have become public enemy number one to the Fox News Channel and the right wing.

I don't think I'm an angry person. I think I'm a person who's angry. I'm angry at the Bush administration; I'm angry at the right wing media. And by that I don't mean the media is right wing. I mean, there is a part of the media that's not the mainstream media. That's Fox, that is 'The Wall Street Journal' editorial page.

The conservative media movement exists primarily as a moneymaking venture.

The reason that conservative talk radio works is because there is an audience for it.

What the right-wing in the United States tries to do is undermine the press.

If politicians are good copy, I like them. If not, I don’t care about them.

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

Then there is the newspaper press, that huge engine for making the political test final.

Fox News is really two news networks. It's a center right news network that has good, solid, interesting coverage if you're watching Chris Wallace or the panel on 'Special Report' or anything like that. Then, it has what Hannity and others like him do, which is just a sort of tribal identity politics for older white people.

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 right-wingness of Fox is basically the news channel. I don't think the broadcast network has any politics at all. It's sub-political at best.

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.

Progressives want a different sort of media than what the Right wants.

We have to be very cognizant of the fact that 90 percent of the electronic media in this country is owned, operated, programmed, and controlled by conservatives. They made a concerted effort during and before the Reagan years that they were going to get the microphone.

Do I believe that their coverage is slanted and biased? Yes. I've seen it with my own eyes. A majority of reporters are liberal.