Carl Bernstein Quotes

Whatever may be said about the power of the press, it is undeniable that it can set the entire public thinking and talking about any topic ...

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.

Injecting new ideas into public debate is the supreme function of the newspaper columnist. Politicians and civil servants absolutely will not take the risk.

The power is to set the agenda. What we print and what we don't print matter a lot.

The presentation of an issue can no longer be controlled.

To say that the newspaper press represents public opinion is to administer insult to intelligent men. It is the property of speculators, political leaders, large contractors and railway directors.

The Washington Post is the first and prime source of information for the national government.... It can come very close to setting the nation's agenda.

As to the journalist himself, it is clear that to get a living he must write to order, that is, he must write in accordance with the views of his paper, in so far as he writes at all on current topics.

There are a lot of people who think our job is to reassure the public every night that their home, their community and their nation is safe. I don't subscribe to that at all. I subscribe to leaving people with essentially … a rough draft of history. Some days it's reassuring, some days it's absolutely destructive.

You have the socialist parties ruling Denmark putting in conservative policies because the conservatives control the media and the public discourse.

The difference between a reporter, a newspaper columnist, a paid speaker, a television personality, a radio talk show host, a blogger, a movie producer, a publicist, and a political strategist, is growing less - and not more - distinct.

Working for CNN, you help set the agenda for decision makers and industry leaders simply by doing your job. What the network covers and how we cover it affects people. I am not naive enough to believe I work in some 'pure' news vacuum.

Opinion pages have an impact on public debate, and they sometimes reveal things the government would rather have kept quiet.

There are so many political talk shows out there that are doing such a good job that it would be foolish of me to try to get in the ring with them.

Now, you watch cable news, and you know what everybody's going to say before they open their mouth.

News isn't just what happens. It's what a fairly small group of people decide is news.

I have great respect for the news and great respect for freedom of the press and all of that.

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.

Is it really the right of the media to dictate to the president whom he will allow in his press conferences? That's tetchier. And then there is the added issue of whether it would be a service to their readers, and the country at large, for, say, the Washington Post to take itself out of the room -- meaning they don't have the ability to ask important questions the president is obliged to answer? I think that would be a mistake.

Sometimes I look around cable news and it's like you wonder whether you're looking at anchors or authors.

And so it is to the printing press--to the recorder of mans deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news-- that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: free and independent.

It's not the day in which I grew up, long time ago, where we had three news networks. No cable, no social media, no internet. Where what you see is what you got. We had basically straight journalism. We don't have that anymore.

The media have such a strong hand in deciding what people's perceptions are. They decide what the agenda is going to be, what the issues are.

The idea of a liberal media bias is simply a myth. If only it were true, we might have a more humane, open-minded, and ultimately effective public debate on the issues facing the country.

I challenge anybody to show me an example of bias in Fox News Channel.