Mark Leibovich Quotes

In this Day the secrets of the earth are laid bare before the eyes of men. The pages of swiftly-appearing newspapers are indeed the mirror of the world. They reflect the deeds and the pursuits of diverse peoples and kindreds. They both reflect them and make them known. They are a mirror endowed with hearing, sight and speech. This is an amazing and potent phenomenon. However, it behooveth the writers thereof to be purged from the promptings of evil passions and desires and to be attired with the raiment of justice and equity. They should enquire into situations as much as possible and ascertain the facts, then set them down in writing.

Cinema has a large scope as it is a mirror of society and with the mindset changing, people are taking it more seriously.

Movies don't necessarily change culture. I don't know if we know for sure if movies change culture but we know for sure that they reflect culture.

Cinema is mass media, it is both overtly gross and exciting. It is our great mirror of society.

Movies mirror the times, they do not create them.

I quote the late Ed Murow. ... He said: 'Look, people listen to me when they want an eyewitness account. 'They think I'm a pretty good reporter. But when it comes to my opinions, mine are not worth anymore than the guy at the end of the bar.' And I believe that about myself.

For all its flexibility, television is more a mirror of taste than a shaper of it.

If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?

History, like journalism, is ever a journey outwards, and you must report back what you find and no more.

I would be lying if I said the journalism doesn't reflect my own choices as a reporter and a writer: what to say, what to emphasize, how to say it, what is true or untrue.

I think it's my interaction with journalists that has pegged me more as political than my actual records, although they have obviously political aspects to them as well.

I have made sense of my life by developing an ability to analyze Mainstream American Cultural Artifacts.

The idea of taking what people call the 'entertainment culture' as a focus of study, including historical perspective, is not a bad idea.

Someone remarked that the newspapers or the news magazines are the same as the psalms except that the names changed in the stories. Maybe you can't understand the psalms without understanding the newspaper and the other way around.

Our job is only to hold up the mirror - to tell and show the public what has happened.

It's hard to decide if TV makes morons out of everyone, or if it mirrors Americans who really are morons to begin with.

Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it represents some other aspect of society.

I almost became a political journalist, having worked as a reporter at the time of Watergate. The proximity to those events motivated me, when I wound up doing philosophy, to try to use it to move the public debate.

If newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art.

Many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism which describes him.

That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.

If you think of human experience as a pie, then the wedge Hollywood is reflecting now is getting smaller and smaller.

I do think 'Gogglebox' is extraordinarily insightful, and I think if politicians want to understand how we are viewed at home, it's quite recommended viewing.

The best kind of art or writing holds up a mirror to society.

I'm not in the business of being 'friendly.' First and foremost, I'm a journalist. My business is the truth. Now, I happen to be other things, too - a pop-culture phenomenon, the most in-demand speaker on the campus lecture circuit, whatever. But I believe in facts.