Michael Deaver Quotes

The biases the media has are much bigger than conservative or liberal. They're about getting ratings, about making money, about doing stories that are easy to cover.

The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there's a major explosion.

The news is the one thing the networks can point to with pride. Everything else they do is crap—and they know it

Precisely because our political speeches are meant to be reported, they are not worth reporting. Precisely because they are carefully designed to be read, nobody reads them.

Oftentimes it feels like Fox stands alone in the media on certain stories.

Which suggests something about media and war: it's not just that events happen and the media documents and presents them. There is a third element: what the public is ready to accept, what the public wants to know.

The world is such a big place, and there's so much that goes on, but a lot of the media really just cover the same thing over and over again.

The media doesn't create narratives, really. They're not that powerful. What they do is they tap into narratives that are already bubbling amongst their viewership or readership.

The bias of the media is neither liberal nor conservative but negative.

The news media more and more considered the politicians to be props in their entertainment shows.

It [television] has locked candidates into ridiculous positions because only ridiculous positions can be compacted into 30-second commercials.

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

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

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.

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.

There are two things that you never turn down: Sex and an invitation to appear on television.

Television is not a gimmick, and if you think it is, you’ll lose again.

Since the rise of television in the 1950s, the media have become the central forum for American politicking, and increasingly today that role is being played by the blogosphere. With the blogger and the viewer replacing the pamphleteer and the parader, politicians focus on marketing themselves and their causes to passive consumers rather than mobilizing passionate soldiers. The new language of politics sounds like this: Spin doctors stage photo ops as pollsters survey voter preferences, spawning celebrity candidates.

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.

I think the media, by and large, if you look at surveys over the years, has never been conservative-leaning by any measure.

I don't think that I would always be asked about my feelings about liberal bias in the media if there wasn't any liberal bias in the media. If it was a moot question, then we wouldn't always have the discussion.

I think that, in my humble opinion, that the world is divided, and the media has a very good, a very predictable habit of emphasizing whatever will keep people clicking.

Asking the question whether the mainstream media has a liberal or conservative bias is like asking whether al Qaeda uses too much oil in their hummus. I might think they use a little bit too much oil; some people might think it's a little dry. But the problem with al Qaeda is they want to kill us. And the problem with the mainstream media is that it has these other biases that are much more important.

I think the media is dangerously close to creating their own product. They used to cover the product, which was whatever's happening.

I think there is a mainstream media. CNN is mainstream media, and the main, ABC, CBS, NBC are mainstream media. And I think it's just essentially to make the point that we are largely in the center without particular axes to grind, without ideologies which are represented in our daily coverage, at least certainly not on purpose.