Robert Dallek Quotes

Palin, Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others have made an art form of convincing far too many Americans to suspend their disbelief, and they have severely damaged the ability of our country to have serious discussions about serious challenges.

I've been interested in watching the level of conservative misinformation that circulates through the media.

I think the 24-hour news cycle has helped exaggerate the differences between the parties. You can always find someone on TV somewhere carping about something. That didn't happen 20 years ago.

Fratricide dominates our public debate, and America is held hostage with tactics of smear and fear.

Television has shortened our political discourse.

Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country-and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.

I wish the American public wasn't so stupid if they realized that half the people on television make a living just to insult the other party.

In the age of Trump, we need to be aware of emotional rhetoric and its power regardless of whether or not it's based in fact.

It irritates me when Trump says what he does.

There is only so many times you can say, 'Trump tweeted something that was bad.' That is not a joke to me.

The media has created this environment that is okay to say almost anything about somebody who is, you know, right of Jane Fonda. You know, if you are slightly conservative or even libertarian points of view, especially if you are persuasive and charismatic and funny and effective, you will get called the most appalling things.

We've had the trivialization of our politics going on ever since we had electronic media.

Twitter isn’t real life, and cable television doesn’t represent the public. The vast majority of Twitter traffic is driven by less than 2% of the public. According to Pew, less than 6% of Americans generate 99% of political tweets. The programs of Tucker Carlson, Lawrence O’Donnell and Anderson Cooper draw prime-time audiences that sound impressive until you realize that together they account for less than 2% of the public.

I don't think what you hear on talk radio is representative of America.

The worst thing about our political system is that people debate; I wish our politicians were able to talk to each other rather than scream while trying to gain sound bites.

One of the things I wanted to do in 'The Death of Truth' was explore some of the larger social and political dynamics that fueled the rise of Trump and brought America to the point where a third of the country will casually shrug off hard facts about everything from the size of inaugural crowds to the crime rate among immigrants.

Allegations become facts, and facts become truth in the eyes of the public, whether they are true or not.

So many red lines have been crossed that people seem to think it is acceptable for politicians and the media to actually incite hatred and violence.

People stop believing what the media tells them when they see media superstars say things like, 'Let the economy fail.'

We are drowning in partisan rhetoric that is just true enough not to be a lie; in industry-sponsored research; in social media's imitation of human connection; in legalese and corporate double-speak.

When people are making up stories about Bob Mueller on Fox News and those get traction in congressional committees and in the White House, at a certain point, I've got to say no.

In this war on truth we are all living in, 'hoax' is a potent, malicious, ugly little word and Trump has been using it more every year. So has Fox.

Glenn Beck and others were pretty outrageous and extremely conspiratorial in the pre-Trump years. I don't mean to totally gloss over some of the nuttiness that was airing on Fox pre-Trump, but I do see a distinction between those years and the Trump years.

People see whatever the media first reports.

The next time a news outlet complains about the state of our political rhetoric or the uninformed U.S. voter, we should promptly point them to the video of Ashley Parker raucous in a Polish cemetery or Philip Rucker's diatribes on party invitations.