Robert Mueller Quotes

The media dwells mostly on negativity.

Do something good and you won’t make page one. Find something bad and you might make page one.

News and entertainment are getting dangerously intertwined.

The expressions of newspapers, like those of orators, could not be accepted without allowance, for they aimed at producing some desired effect, and said either more or less than the truth.

Journalism is now not only reflecting what is happening, it is affecting what is happening. Governments all over the world watch CNN.

It’s a lot easier and cheaper to have thumbsuckers and pundits on television than it is to have reporters and news bureaus around the world.

What you say about the newspapers is very true ... They are indeed a curious compound of truth and untruth. I am so used to newspaper nonsense and attacks that I do not mind it in the least....

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.

There evolved a new media definition of civility that privileged "balance" over truth-telling—even when one side was lying. It's a real and profound change.

The news media are, for the most part, the bringers of bad news... and it's not entirely the media's fault, bad news gets higher ratings and sells more papers than good news.

I am not anti-media at all. But the media, the news anywhere in the world, is based on drama.

Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

Fair and balanced is doublespeak for bite-out-chunks-of-truth until only irrelevancy is left, byte-sized, entertaining irrelevancy

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

The press ... is but the servant of human intellect and its ministry is for good or evil, according to the character of those who direct it. The press is a mill that grinds all that is put into its hopper. Fill the hopper with poisoned grain and it will grind it to meal, but there is death in the bread.

Those bastards [the press] can rip a single page out of the Bible, and if they play it right, they can make Jesus Christ sound like the devil.

Of all newspaper presses, I never heard anyone deny that the American is the worst.... [N]othing is easier than to make the people know only one side of a question; few things are easier than to keep them altogether from the knowledge of any particular affair; and, worse than all, on them [the American people] may easily be practiced the discovery that lies may work their intended effect, before the truth can overtake them. It is hard to tell which is worse; the wide diffusion of things that are not true or the suppression of things that are.

I'd have to set my hair on fire to get on the news.

What draws the press is conflict, corruption and scandal.

Newspapers form public opinion, but public opinion also influences newspapers. The general masses are not like horses that can be tamed and trained to do their masters bidding.

Many newspapers have become players as well as spectators in the political debate.

There has been a reflex throughout the history of modern news: When the country goes to war, so do the major news organizations. They consider it ‘patriotic.’ But it is dubious patriotism that abandons citizens in unnecessary ignorance of critical information…The before-and-after picture of U.S. officialdom presents a stark lesson of the tragedies of war and propaganda repeated in the major media.

Turner, forget it. We don't go in for that kind of crap that you have back in New York -- of being obliged to print both sides. We're going to beat this son-of-a-bitch Sinclair any way we can. We're going to kill him.

The sports pages record man’s accomplishments. The front pages record his failures.

Editorialists who tell downright lies in order to advance their own agendas do more to discredit the press than all the censors in the world.