Ken Clawson Quotes

The Arab Press is a deeply distorted lens.

I wish the media stopped making two and two equal five all the time.

The media are less a window on reality, than a stage on which officials and journalists perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions.

Bad stories are written about me because the press knows they can make me into a weeping dog and few people will object.

Don't worry over what the newspapers say. I don't. Why should anyone else? I told the truth to the newspaper correspondents - but when you tell the truth to them they are at sea.

Anybody who has had the pleasure of reading an article about themselves in the press knows that, on the whole, there is a huge amount of inaccuracy, value judgment and the use of a crowbar to insert editorial bias that reflects the current political leaning of that particular paper.

You know journalists. You know the media. They are going to hang on to anything negative they possibly can.

The truth is not wonderful enough to suit the newspapers; so they enlarge upon it, and invent ridiculous embellishments.

Sensationalism sells: Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story.

The good news does not make the front pages. The bad news does make the front pages.

The expressions of newspapers, like those of orators, could not be accepted without allowance, for they aimed at producing some desired effect, and said either more or less than the truth.

The press ... is but the servant of human intellect and its ministry is for good or evil, according to the character of those who direct it. The press is a mill that grinds all that is put into its hopper. Fill the hopper with poisoned grain and it will grind it to meal, but there is death in the bread.

The presentation of an issue can no longer be controlled.

While they shriek for "freedom of the press" when there is no slightest threat to that freedom, they deny to citizens that freedom from the press to which the decencies of life entitle them. They misrepresent, they distort, they color, they blackguard, they lie.

I am being portrayed as some kind of a medieval monster ... a megalomaniac. If the people were to really believe all that the press has written about me then I must be the most evil person in the country today.

Those villainous reporters [Stephen] Douglas has with him.

… yellow journalism

Editorialists who tell downright lies in order to advance their own agendas do more to discredit the press than all the censors in the world.

In politics there is a lot of spin—a lot of BS. My job is to cut through the BS.

There is no lie too improbable, no distortion too great, no smear campaign too dirty for the State Department and the media to embrace.

What you say about the newspapers is very true ... They are indeed a curious compound of truth and untruth. I am so used to newspaper nonsense and attacks that I do not mind it in the least....

We suffer quite as much from exaggerated, hysterical, and untruthful statements in the press as from any wrongdoing by businessmen or politicians.

The press aren't willing to wait for whatever the truth is - the truth never catches up with the lie... Destroying people ought not to be a competitive business.

You give a press conference, and they'll pick one word, they'll pick two words. The media is still out to write what they want to write.

People have their own opinions but sometimes with the media things get chopped up and cut around to make stories out of it.