Haskell Wexler Quotes

It is not at all clear how much the media influences public opinion and how much public opinion influences the media.

Television is apparently the enemy of nuance. But nuance is essential for a thoughtful discussion.

In this day and age, much of journalism is about right or left, conservative or liberal, and 'The Observer' is just that: an observer. It is about truth.

TV serves us most usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse - news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion.

If it doesn’t happen on television, it doesn’t happen.

The media has become more forceful, has begun to recognize its traditional historic role and act on it, and truth is infectious.

The Times has much less power than you think. I believe we attribute power to the media generally that it simply doesn't have. It's very convenient to blame the media, the same way we blame television for everything that's going wrong in society.

I never believed the anchorman should be the know-it-all. And I try to communicate that to the audience. While I have some knowledge from my years of experience, what I want to do is walk you through this because we're all walking through this together.

All television is educational television. The question is: what is it teaching?

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

People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.

What you don't get in the mainstream media is so much of the background material.

You have to understand the separation between what exists in the print media and what exists in reality. It's important to never lose track of reality.

Which suggests something about media and war: it's not just that events happen and the media documents and presents them. There is a third element: what the public is ready to accept, what the public wants to know.

Media play a powerful role in establishing and perpetuating social norms.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.

And you see many people just turning away from these channels of mass media, and they're just turning in to alternative providers, because they just see what's happening.

The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly. News reports, information, statistics, and surveys are everywhere.

Well I think the media has a very powerful influence on almost anything and everything we do because the general public gets their perception of what is going on in things they don't have immediate access to from what they get through the media.

Today, political events are nullified unless they're on TV.

It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.

You can't get all of your news from Jon Stewart, especially since it's a comedy show.

The media works in sound bites. They can make you look like a genius or stupid.

Once we thought, journalists and readers alike, that if we put together enough 'facts' and gave them a fast stir, we would come up with something that, at least by the standards of short-order cooks, could be called the truth.