Will McDonough Quotes

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

We need ethical journalism. There is also capacity limitations in journalism.

Let's be clear: there was no golden age of journalism. The media has always been bad. And instead of improving, it spent a lot of time and energy making up its own myth.

I accept the media for what they are. Most of them are really good people. Some of them are scumbags.

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.

The democratic approach to news is a very valuable thing. We're always going to be dependent on the quality of reporting of mainstream media.

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.

As far as I'm concerned, it's a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity.

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

The essence of American journalism is vulgarity divested of truth.

The level of journalism in this country is just so pathetically poor, and I've, in a sense, gone over the top of them, which they don't like.

I don't want to paint everybody with the same broad brush. But I do think that the majority of folks now in the briefing room, that are going into journalism - they're not there for the facts and the pursuit of the truth.

There's a great deal of enthusiasm about quality, serious journalism. And some of it relates to personalities because it's people who do the news. But I think it reflects a real desire for facts, real news and reporting.

I'm very much in support of the free press, but the free press ought to be educational and informative. And I believe they have fallen down recently on that.

Where are reliable journalism and reliable investigative voices going to come from? I love the days of old - the Walter Cronkites, the Dan Rathers.

The media's gotten lazy. They don't check anything out. You report what he reports.

Journalism: A profession whose business is to explain to others what it personally does not understand.

There's an old saw about journalism that the more you know about a subject, the less sense reporting about it makes.

It's all storytelling, you know. That's what journalism is all about.

Its attitude, which it has preached and practiced, is skepticism. Now, it finds, the public is applying that skepticism to the press.

Given what the media have put the country through this past decade, it must come as a surprise to most Americans that the press has a code of ethics.

My own view, there is a need for and a demonstrated need for more journalism now than there ever has been.

They take journalism really seriously because they know the force that it is and can be.

I read the NY Times but I don't trust all of it.

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