Lawrence O'Donnell Quotes

It's CNN's bigger problem that CNN wants to deny reality. I, too, used to drink the Kool-Aid that it was a top journalism operation that reports without bias. Now that I'm outside the walls of traditional media, I know there is no such thing.

I think that 'Fox News' is fair and balanced.

I think there are a lot of reasons to be critical of the media in America.

I'm not in the judgment part of journalism.

I don't think Fox News or Rush Limbaugh need Clinton it turns out. I think there's a hunger out there for - whether it's on the left or right - a more lively and provocative type of political journalism. I think Salon and Fox on the other side have both benefited from that.

I never, ever have seen media this way. It's almost indescribable. Making up stories, refusing to run real stories. It's making themselves look like utter fools. There's no journalism, there is no media. There's pure, full-fledged advocacy here.

There is a long-standing tradition in the mainstream press of middle-of-the-road journalism that is objective and fair. I would hate to see that fall victim to a panic about the Fox effect.

People who think there is something pedestrian about journalism are just ignorant.

It's hard to know now who, if anyone, in the media has any credibility.

I did very extensive diligence on Al Jazeera English, the network from which Al Jazeera America is going to be derived, and it's really very clear that they have long since established a reputation for excellence and integrity and objectivity.

Once we thought, journalists and readers alike, that if we put together enough 'facts' and gave them a fast stir, we would come up with something that, at least by the standards of short-order cooks, could be called the truth.

I do not subscribe to the advocacy journalism school. It's not who I am and not who CNN wants me to be.

'Reality' is a notion that journalists take for granted.

Journalism, as practiced by some, has become something akin to professional wrestling—something to watch rather than believe.

Too often reporters covering scientific debates give fringe views equal weight in a misguided attempt to achieve balance.

We in the media should be breaking the news and not making the news.

All the news that fits we print.

If we shake the pillar of a free and objective press, we're harming our American national interests.

I get my information from the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Fox News.

The more servile a reporter is toward his sources, the more authoritative he can appear in print.

The newspapers! Sir, they are the most villainous — licentious — abominable — infernal — Not that I ever read them — no — I make it a rule never to look into a newspaper.

The good journalist is never objective. He is always neutral.

A journalists's job is not to be balanced. It is to be accurate.

The media increase the political nastiness while distancing voters from those clashes. Citizens become spectators. ­Headline-­driven news emphasizes the extremes, the fights, the hysteria, the sensational. Political reporters, trying to appear objective by quoting two opposing sides to almost every story, mostly sharpen the differences, slighting any centrist position.

Is journalism a profession that serves the public by maintaining high standards, or is it a social construct that should be redesigned to directly serve certain social goods? Some argue that all journalism involves bias, either hidden or revealed. But it is one thing to say that objectivity and fairness are ultimately unreachable. It is another to cease grasping for them. That would be a world of purely private truths, in which the boldest liars and demagogues would thrive.