Walter Pincus Quotes
There is more than two sides. Facts are often apart from what both sides say about each other.
Walter Pincus, Journalist, PBS The Moyers Report, December 11, 2007
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
At that time Brown’s Republican Party was dominated by extreme conservatives who tended to attack the character and motivation of anyone who did not agree with them—including members of their own party. Brown however came from a state with a strong Republican tradition of liberalism, which however then had a majority of Democrats as most of the liberal Republicans had been driven out of the party by the Republican extremists. At the time, the Republican party had become so extremist that many thought him disloyal to the part for making this statement. The Tea Party credo then as good people do not support evil and immoral policies and they tended to see almost all policies in moral and ethical terms.
Most people are surprised that this is a reality of something like physics although sophisticated philosophers have been making this point with respect to human relations for many years. Politics is a particularly good example where conflicting realities can both exist at the same time.
Even as late as the 1970s most media organizations did not feel any inhibition about having a spokesperson for a political movement or candidate comment about statements that were clearly untrue. The constant political criticism of the media produced this change and no matter how absurd or false a political statement is, most media will have a spokesperson for the lie appear on the program to repeat the lie. Both political parties are thereby encouraged to exaggerate or even lie as they will never by exposed by trusted journalists and can reduce all falsehoods to a “he says, she says.”
He was referring to the 2016 Presidential Campaign Politifact showed that Hillary Clinton’s facts were not valid and truthful 25 percent of the time and Donald Trump’s were false more than 70 percent of the time. Never before have there been so many falsehoods exchanged in a Presidential Campaign.
Walter Haskell Pincus is a national security journalist. He reported for The Washington Post until the end of 2015. He has won several prizes including a Polk Award in 1977, a television Emmy in 1981, and shared a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting with five other Washington Post reporters, and the 2010 Arthur Ross Media Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy. Since 2003, he has taught at Stanford University's Stanford in Washington program.
