Herbert Bayard Swope Quotes

Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.

You turn on the news, there're no facts anymore. 'Here's what's happening today,' and then you cut to thirty minutes of people in little boxes, little windows, telling you their opinions on it. It seems like all the news is going on in the ticker-tape on the bottom of the news. It's all opinion, it's all editorial.

A narrow and distorted picture of America often emerges from the televised news. A single dramatic piece of the mosaic becomes, in the minds of millions, the entire picture.

I am always being described as having views that I've never had in my life.

The media's worried about whether I've paid my taxes; they're worried about any number of silly things that have nothing to do with America.

By choice, polls validate the media’s filtered view of the world.

There are a lot of ways to practice the art of journalism, and one of them is to use your art like a hammer to destroy the right people — who are almost always your enemies, for one reason or another, and who usually deserve to be crippled, because they are wrong. This is a dangerous notion, and very few professional journalists will endorse it — calling it "vengeful" and "primitive" and "perverse" regardless of how often they might do the same thing themselves. "That kind of stuff is opinion," they say, "and the reader is cheated if it's not labelled as opinion." Well, maybe so. Maybe Tom Paine cheated his readers and Mark Twain was a devious fraud with no morals at all who used journalism for his own foul ends. And maybe H. L. Mencken should have been locked up for trying to pass off his opinions on gullible readers and normal "objective journalism." Mencken understood that politics — as used in journalism — was the art of controlling his environment, and he made no apologies for it. In my case, using what politely might be called "advocacy journalism," I've used reporting as a weapon to affect political situations that bear down on my environment.

The press creates a caricature.

What the media does to Trump is what they did the cops - say the police are really harmful, then later ask why people are so scared of the police.

I did not believe that the public was sophisticated enough to understand that a newsman could wear several hats and that we had the ability to turn off - nearly, you can't say perfectly, but nearly - all of our prejudices and biases.

You give a press conference, and they'll pick one word, they'll pick two words. The media is still out to write what they want to write.

The mainstream media decided long ago that Hillary Clinton was going to be a fabulous global leader regardless of how she performed.

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

The country gets so beat up in the media. It's worth remembering how much we love America.

Every news network within their division has opinion and then has news.

People have their own opinions but sometimes with the media things get chopped up and cut around to make stories out of it.

You know the press and the TV. There are those who are favourites and those who are not. I was one of the latter.

Don't forget that Rupert Murdoch has always regarded the Op Ed pages of 'The Wall Street Journal' - as he's said to me - as a cup of strong caffeine that gets you going in the morning and tells you what to think.

You know, the media always tries to twist things and make things into what they're not.

The media paint ugly pictures about you.

I do think people need to recognize that a lot of journalists want to write a story a certain way because the story will be better or the portrayal will be better, or at least recognize that whenever you're looking at something, you're seeing it through somebody's eyes who may actually not be the person who is the most insightful.

Fox News has changed its slogan from 'Fair and Balanced' to 'See, I told you so!'

People continually ask me, "Why does the media do what it does? Why are they so obviously self-destructive? Why are they so obviously predictable? Why is the media so obviously biased? Do they not see how other people see?" No, they don't. But then again, they don't care, folks.

Hillary Clinton has an entire media empire that constantly demonizes Donald Trump, fails to point out several signs of illness by her.

What if Americans were all judged by the actions of the Bush administration and people did not know the truth? That America is full of people who are, at present, poorly represented and poorly catered to by the media.