Fran Lebowitz Quotes

You guys at Fox can't seem to get your facts straight.

If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.

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

I send you the newspapers; but they do not always speak true.

The essence of American journalism is vulgarity divested of truth.

How do you know the news is reliable if you didn’t gather it yourself?

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.

I have to say, I have never watched 'Infowars.' I know that they say zany things that are patently untrue. But I also think that MSNBC says zany things that are patently untrue.

Everybody wrings their hands about Fox News. You know, "fair and balanced? Why, that's snide!" Yeah, okay, maybe they're not fair and balanced, but CNN used to have the slogan "You Can Depend on CNN". Guess what? I watch it, no you can't. So what's the difference?

I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are.

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.

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.

News isn't even the truth on television.

I read the NY Times but I don't trust all of it.

I have yet to meet very many people in the press who are really, truly interested in writing a good story or getting at the truth. Most press people, when they come into an article, have an angle that they want already, so they need points to support that angle, whatever the angle may be.

I do think the biggest problem newspapers have is loss of trust, and I feel that's a result of failure to speak truth to power.

Some people believe everything they see on TV. People, it's called tel-lie-vision!

No longer is there a quest for the truth so much as there is this apparent need to present both sides of an issue even if one is nothing but lies and distortions.

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

Of all newspaper presses, I never heard anyone deny that the American is the worst.... [N]othing is easier than to make the people know only one side of a question; few things are easier than to keep them altogether from the knowledge of any particular affair; and, worse than all, on them [the American people] may easily be practiced the discovery that lies may work their intended effect, before the truth can overtake them. It is hard to tell which is worse; the wide diffusion of things that are not true or the suppression of things that are.

The listeners can see through our manipulation of the news too clearly. It is all laid on too thickly.

What you say about the newspapers is very true ... They are indeed a curious compound of truth and untruth. I am so used to newspaper nonsense and attacks that I do not mind it in the least....

We don't print the truth. We don't pretend to print the truth. We print what people tell us. It's up to the public to decide what's the truth.

There is a bias in the press for facts over fiction.

I can't believe anything I hear on television anymore.