Walter Lippmann Quotes

It is not an event; it is a piece of news.

News isn't just what happens. It's what a fairly small group of people decide is news.

We wanted to prove that I am not just a provocateur, as the television said [referring to a Fox news clip shown in the film]. It's challenging, but it's not just challenging.

I felt that from my end, I should deal with the thing itself, which is the event. I pretty much functioned like the media itself.

the press is too often a distorting mirror, which deforms the people and events it represents, making them seem bigger or smaller than they really are.

I feel like people have more in common than the news reports.

You can't have Rosie on The View and Elton John packing Mom and Pop in at Caesars Palace and gay people all over television, and then have these politicians run out there with a straight face and say that gay and lesbian relationships are a threat to the family. We are winning in the culture - which is why we'll ultimately win the political war.

We're looking at two different presidents here if all we have to go on is the media. When Donald Trump is in Washington, D.C., what is he? He is a genuine idiot. He's impolitic, he's uninformed, he's running a chaotic administration where nobody knows what anybody is doing. Whenever they do anything it is disastrous. But the Donald Trump of Washington doesn't exist, because the Donald Trump of Washington is what is reported in the Drive-By Media.

I can't tell you how many times we'll run into a journalist and go, "Boy that's...I wish we could be saying that. That's exactly the way we see it and that's exactly the way we'd like to be saying that." And I always think, "Well, why don't you?"

Journalists say that when a dog bites a man, that is not news, but when a man bites a dog, that is news ... Thanks to the mathematics of combinatorics, we will never run out of news.

All Presidents start out to run a crusade but after a couple of years they find they are running something less heroic and much more intractable: namely the presidency. The people are well cured by then of election fever, during which they think they are choosing Moses. In the third year, they look on the man as a sinner and a bumble and begin to poke around for rumors of another Messiah.

People just - they don't really know me. They see me on "The Simple Life," they think that's really who I am.

Donald Trump told ABC news that if he had Oprah as a running mate, they could easily win. Although you know who'd definitely win? Oprah WITHOUT Donald Trump.

Some people might only recognize me half naked in my bikini and bra!

The Supreme Court said nothing about silliness, but I suspect it may play more of a role than one might suppose. People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust... Probably the first slave ship, with Negroes lying in chains on its decks, seemed commonsensical to the owners who operated it and to the planters who patronized it. But such a vessel would not be in the realm of common sense today. The only sense that is common, in the long run, is the sense of change.

The news is not gender-neutral, but it's usually reported as though it's gender-neutral.

I think that Donald Trump has faced an unprecedented avalanche of critical coverage when he was running and frankly, I think, it in part he owes his victory to that.

In 1961 somebody could've hit a home run to win the game and the next day the headline was about the M&M boys not hitting a home run. But everyone was real good about it. Instead of getting mad they joked about it.

The media can make anything true or untrue. So if you do 80 films and you play a bad guy ten times, then you're a bad guy, and then the media repeats that.

Anchors like Megyn Kelly are incredibly powerful in terms of distilling the information and reporting the news and maybe some opinion to the public in a fair handed and complete way.

Mitt Romney is not going to run for president. Mitt said it's time for fresh faces. So that's good news for Bruce Jenner.

Cameras in court are just messengers; don't blame them, blame the participants.

People say it's not what happens in your life that matters, it's what you think happened. But this qualification, obviously, did not go far enough. It was quite possible that the central event of your life could be something that didn't happen, or something you thought didn't happen. Otherwise there'd be no need for fiction, there'd only be memoirs and histories.

On radio, you're an artist. On TV, you're a servant.

I think I have a pretty good take on popular culture that maybe makes up for the fact that I'm not a sound-bite politician for the nightly news.