David Shields Quotes

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

In this day and age, much of journalism is about right or left, conservative or liberal, and 'The Observer' is just that: an observer. It is about truth.

I've thought for the last decade or so, the only actual place raw truth was seeping through in newspapers was on the Comics Pages. They were able to pull off intelligent social comment, pure truths not found elsewhere in the news pages, and had the ability to make it all funny, entertaining, and pertinent.

Embedded in 'The New York Times' institutional perspective and reporting methodologies are all sorts of quite debatable and subjective political and cultural assumptions about the world. And with some noble exceptions, 'The Times,' by design or otherwise, has long served the interests of the same set of elite and powerful factions.

I want the news delivered unbiased. I thought that was the whole point with journalism.

Journalists hold themselves apart, and above, the common person. They have rules designed to ensure their objectivity and impartiality.

Television doesn't like politics very well, if you can infer that from the way they cover it.

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 don't think liberals in the media are really that much different from liberals outside the media.

Surveys have shown going back as far as you and I can remember that people have perceived a leftward tilt in the basic coverage that they get on TV news.

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

When a reporter sits down at the typewriter, he's nobody's friend.

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

1952 was the last year that television covered a political event as if television weren't there.

The Washington press corps is all too often the Praetorian Guard of the left.

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.

Objectivity in the end is an unattainable ideal.

… there was partisanship in the newspapers …. Newspapers were not neutral. Newspapers were the political vehicle of a particular group and sometimes they were the cultural vehicle as well. It is also important to keep in mind that some of the newspaper editors were very friendly with … political leaders

Some people will say that words like ‘scum’ and ‘rotten’ are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

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

The Newspaper wants me to by neutral with respect to Germany, as if anyone could be neutral in this war.

In the cable news arena, you have two partisan networks looking out for their viewers. I think CNN needs to look out for the rest of us.

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

Stop pretending journalists are anything other than the Hillary PR team.

Even if everything its detractors say about Fox were true, the most liberal of liberal attitudes would be that one would get credit for being in the lion's den.