Mark Leibovich Quotes

The Congressional leaders set the agenda for journalism; it's not the other way around.

I realise that, strutting around in power corridors for political coverage, a journalist becomes half a politician.

In the 1970s, 'The Boys on the Bus' exposed how a clubby pack of male political reporters ruled the road to the White House and shaped the news. Four decades later, an outsider gal from Alaska has commandeered the 2012 media bus - and left Beltway journalism insiders eating her dust.

Many reporters, when they go to work in the nation’s capital, begin thinking of themselves as participants in the political process instead of glorified stenographers.

At the end of the day, media is going to say whatever they're going to say.

There's nothing good on the news. You're not telling me CNN is all cats in trees, are you? Nothing can be that good if Piers Morgan is in it, you know what I mean?

The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.

The media tries to do what they do. You can't stop. You gotta get money.

Maybe it is because of Facebook or something else, but I have been interested in journalism for a long time.

I can get a better grasp of what is going on in the world from one good Washington dinner party than from all the background information NBC piles on my desk.

From the late David Broder on down, the most powerful and influential of the great Washington columnists and journalists tend to cultivate the driest, least lively voices possible.

My father left me with a clear sense that the media was something different.

As someone who's been covering presidential campaigns since the 1950s, I have no delusions about political reporting. Candidates bargaining access to get the kind of news coverage they want is nothing new.

It is grievous to read the papers in most respects, I agree. More and more I skim the headlines only, for one can be sure what is carried beneath them quite automatically, if one has long been a reader of the press journalism.

I cover media people the way they cover politicians.

Every year, the White House Correspondents' Dinner inspires two competing varieties of coverage: celebrity-obsessed fawning and angry tirades about how it represents everything twisted about our broken democracy. It doesn't, really.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

I don't love the media. I'm part of it, but you can't love a porcupine.

Clinton... believes that the Washington Press Corps is so out of touch that it is absolutely inconceivable that reporters would understand the issues that people are really dealing with in their lives.

There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

1952 was the last year that television covered a political event as if television weren't there.

Journalism is now not only reflecting what is happening, it is affecting what is happening. Governments all over the world watch CNN.

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

Today the greatest evil—and therefore the most immediate—is the press.

I accept the media for what they are. Most of them are really good people. Some of them are scumbags.