Bill Kristol Quotes

The five million people who watch cable news are the political nation, the people who really care.

I think you could argue that President Obama could have watched a little cable news... I do think that there is value in understanding where the conversation is and having a little less detachment where the popular conversation is.

Most people get their politics, obviously, from TV shows about senators or movies about them or... all the day-to-day press and the talk shows.

My parents were really political. The news was very important in our home. We basically had dinner every night while watching the news, and then we'd discuss it with our parents.

The media, the polls and our legislatures fortunately have short attention spans.

If people don't know who you are, they're not going to listen to your message. And not everybody pays attention to politicians by watching Fox News and CNN.

I don't care a straw for your newspaper articles, my constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures.

Everybody is within reach of a television set. And so they're all politicized, and they're all stimulated, and then they have these desires, pleasures, hates, resentments, and so on, and they're reacting instantaneously.

How many watched the President's speech last night? [half-hearted audience applause] How many watched American Idol ? [thundering applause] Okay, there you go! You get the government you deserve.

The media, far from being a conspiracy to dull the political sense of the people, could be viewed as a conspiracy to disguise the extent of political indifference.

If you're watching cable news, you are going to get a distorted picture.

That endless book, the newspaper, is our national glory.

I never wanted it to get to this point. I had hoped that, by its own course, by the way the media covers politics, people would open their eyes and see who Donald Trump really is. But that, unfortunately, has not happened. The polls in the early states indicate that he's been able to fool a significant number of people into believing that he is something that he is not.

I don't read newspapers too much , just because they tend to make me feel I have a political obligation that I think is a distraction from what my political offerings are going to be if I just make my movies.

The people who didn't vote for [Donald Trump], didn't watch his rallies. They only know what the media said about him.

the public never is independently responsive to news.

I think cable television is wobbling and I think people aren't going to forget what happened - because you had a situation where one of the candidates was hated, not just disagreed with, hated. You can't have that. If you hate somebody, I've got to step aside or I need tell the audience look, I hate this person. You know I'm not going to give you an objective view of them. But they didn't do that about Donald Trump.

Despite romantic fantasies about caring candidates who learn of America in donut shops, most politicians rely on media to teach them what concerns the average person.

I am where a great many voters are, which is that I am listening and watching and coming to a decision.

I think that politics in most people's lives expresses itself like that: indirectly, in half thought-out opinions and feelings. And sometimes through a connection with something that is very real. But we don't have the knowledge or language to speak about it.

I don't watch cable news at night. So I can honestly tell you that I am not in a funk, I am not depressed, I'm not suicidal, I'm not thinking it's over.

In Obama's world, it's Fox News and me that are the reason the Republican base doesn't like him. It can't possibly be that those people actually pay attention, are actually intelligent, informed, and they actually disagree with what he's doing. It can't be that because you are not that smart and independently thinkable. You're like the Democrat base. You're bunch of idiots who only know and do and believe what you're told. There may be a degree of exaggeration in there, but that is exactly how the left looks at their voters, and that's how they look at the whole population.

Part of what's changed in politics is social media and how people are receiving information.

It's not the day in which I grew up, long time ago, where we had three news networks. No cable, no social media, no internet. Where what you see is what you got. We had basically straight journalism. We don't have that anymore.

If you're working on better conditions for prisoners, if you make that a popular issue and you invite mainstream media to weigh in on that subject, you're going to end up with a much more regressive public-policy environment than if you approach it in a quieter way. It's not because the public is stupid, it's just that people with only a cursory interest in something are going to have a knee-jerk reaction to it. That's impossible to explain in a cable-news media... it doesn't make sense.