Bill Kristol Quotes

Stop pretending journalists are anything other than the Hillary PR team.

There are some programs on FOX that are not only fair and balanced, they're commentary shows. They don't have to be. But they brag about how fair and balanced they are. They don't cover rallies and tea parties. They cheer lead for rallies and tea parties. And as a journalist, I am totally against that.

With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

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.

I don't want to paint everybody with the same broad brush. But I do think that the majority of folks now in the briefing room, that are going into journalism - they're not there for the facts and the pursuit of the truth.

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.

The first word I would remove from the folklore of journalism is the word objective.

Many journalists become very defensive when you suggest to them that they are anything but impartial and objective. The problem with those words "impartiality" and "objectivity" is that they have lost their dictionary meaning. They've been taken over. "Impartiality" and "objectivity" now mean the establishment point of view.

The trouble is nowadays that parts of the media operate in a very partisan way. There's no point in complaining about it, that's the way it is. But let's be clear, a lot of it is driven by the views of a pretty small number of people, rather than a normal standard of journalism.

Look, I think liberals have reasonable gripes with Fox News. It does lean to the right, primarily in its opinion programming but also in its story selection (which is fine by me) and elsewhere. But it's worth remembering that Fox is less a bastion of ideological conservatism and more a populist, tabloidy network.

I think The New York Times is one of the most dishonest media outlets I've ever seen in my life. The worst. The worst. The absolute worse. They have an agenda that you wouldn't believe.

For the journalist, anything probable is gospel truth.

I think most newspapermen by definition have to be liberal; if they're not liberal, by definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen. If they're preordained dogmatists for a cause, then they can't be very good journalists.

If you consider the great journalists in history, you don't see too many objective journalists on that list.

The rise of Donald Trump established a new ground zero for liberal media, requiring no pretence of balance - better yet, with a kind of political brain haemorrhage, everybody seemed to have lost the ability to be balanced.

Yes, the mainstream media is painfully biased.

The 'Times' is understood to be almost the unofficial biographer of the country, in some strange way to be printing a kind of quasi-neutral truth or even, in some people's minds, slightly center-left version of reality.

A lot of journalists don't want to conflate their own opinions with those of their employers… With a YouTube video, you can be as personal or as journalistic as you want.

When's the last time CNN broke an important story or really made the government angry? I literally can't remember. That's because they're built to be inoffensive. They do the opposite of watchdog journalism. They simply pass on the government's message to their audience.

I've met many journalists who impress me with their ability to play it straight. I think they're the exception to the rule.

When a reporter files a piece about Republican that slams Republican or law enforcement or hypes up climate change, there's no attempt to expose their bias, to look at their background. And then when you find out later that they usually have a bias.

I think what Donald Trump is reflecting is - and I know the media always discounts this because you don't like to get criticized. But you don't treat us the same way that you treat Democrats. Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama , they get the benefit of the doubt.

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.

It is very difficult to have a free, fair and honest press anywhere in the world. In the first place, as a rule, papers are largely supported by advertising, and that immediately gives the advertisers a certain hold over the medium they use.

A lot of the people involved in the media are very serious, honest people, and they will tell you, and I think they are right, that they are not being forced to write anything... What they don't tell you, and are maybe unaware of, is that they are allowed to write freely because their beliefs conform to the... standard doctrinal system, and then, yes, they are allowed to write freely and are not coerced.