Sean Spicer Quotes

What we call 'the news' always has tried to tell a story, and it's always told the story it wanted or, put most positively, whatever story it believed needed telling.

When I turn on the news in Paris, the way Syria is covered is different from the way it is covered in Washington, D.C., or London. Even in Western society, where we hold all the values of democracy and freedom of speech, as soon as you point a camera in a particular direction, there is an angle - literally and figuratively.

The media doesn't create narratives, really. They're not that powerful. What they do is they tap into narratives that are already bubbling amongst their viewership or readership.

In the cable news arena, you have two partisan networks looking out for their viewers. I think CNN needs to look out for the rest of us.

I've never really figured out why the media covers the media, you know?

I don't think that I would always be asked about my feelings about liberal bias in the media if there wasn't any liberal bias in the media. If it was a moot question, then we wouldn't always have the discussion.

I do find that the mainstream media oftentimes is what I would consider off base or has a bias.

The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there's a major explosion.

There's no worse crime in journalism these days than simply deciding something's a story because Drudge links to it.

Which suggests something about media and war: it's not just that events happen and the media documents and presents them. There is a third element: what the public is ready to accept, what the public wants to know.

Events that get covered in the U.S. one way are not very important elsewhere or are given a completely different slant, and one needs to have a kind of comparative way of thinking in order to arrive at a judgment that is not completely provincial, that doesn't end up ratifying one's own national perspective and hence, one's own national agendas.

Television doesn't like politics very well, if you can infer that from the way they cover it.

I don't think liberals in the media are really that much different from liberals outside the media.

Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.

Oftentimes it feels like Fox stands alone in the media on certain stories.

I think the media, by and large, if you look at surveys over the years, has never been conservative-leaning by any measure.

I don't think we treat people very well in the media, both as customers - and I call them customers - of newspapers and magazines, or TV news, and we don't understand that the greatest story that we could tell, each and every day, is the story of the people around us.

Yes, the mainstream media is painfully biased.

It's only because you can now watch cheerfully biased Fox News that you begin to realize how cheerlessly biased CNN really is - and always was. Or CBS. Or ABC. Or the BBC.

I've heard it said that the first law of journalism is to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it.

I think there is a mainstream media. CNN is mainstream media, and the main, ABC, CBS, NBC are mainstream media. And I think it's just essentially to make the point that we are largely in the center without particular axes to grind, without ideologies which are represented in our daily coverage, at least certainly not on purpose.

There's no question that the media today has a relationship with Barack Obama that... I can't say it's unique, because the modern-day media is the Democrat Party and their objective is to advance the Democrat Party agenda as well as try to discredit any opposing agenda, which would be us and the Republicans. But the relationship they've got with Obama is above and beyond that.

I really am convinced that what is happening in media today is the result of the birth of conservative media and its rapid growth and ascension. It has destroyed the left's monopoly in media. When they had the monopoly, they could pretend that they were not what they are and get away with it. They could pretend to be objective. You know, the power of a monopoly is not just determining what stories you are going to cover, but what you don't cover is just as powerful.

Asking the question whether the mainstream media has a liberal or conservative bias is like asking whether al Qaeda uses too much oil in their hummus. I might think they use a little bit too much oil; some people might think it's a little dry. But the problem with al Qaeda is they want to kill us. And the problem with the mainstream media is that it has these other biases that are much more important.

He [Tony Blair] was always ambivalent about the [Rupert] Murdoch papers. But he gave other papers the chance to believe it was just about 'The Independent.' And that was wrong.