Richard Quest Quotes

Journalism is now not only reflecting what is happening, it is affecting what is happening. Governments all over the world watch CNN.

The Washington Post is the first and prime source of information for the national government.... It can come very close to setting the nation's agenda.

If you've got a big star like O'Reilly, it does overshadow what the hard-news guys do during the day. That's the nature of television.

CNN is destroying their franchise. They've become either the trial network or the story network.

Newsmen believe that news is a tacitly acknowledged fourth branch of the federal system. This is why most news about government sounds as if it were federally mandated -- serious, bulky and blandly worthwhile, like a high-fiber diet set in type.

The New York Times does an unbelievable amount of damage because every day television and radio stations along with the rest of media take their lead on the way the news should be presented along with what actually is the news.

The Congressional leaders set the agenda for journalism; it's not the other way around.

The press doesn't just cover presidential campaigns, they influence them by making arbitrary decisions about who is 'top tier' and merits coverage.

Local television news, on both radio and television, is so appalling. Makes print journalism look like the greatest stuff ever written.

What we call 'the news' always has tried to tell a story, and it's always told the story it wanted or, put most positively, whatever story it believed needed telling.

The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.

They take journalism really seriously because they know the force that it is and can be.

The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if it were.

My worry about the New York Times is that it's got the only position as a national elitist general-interest paper. So the network news picks up its cues from the Times. And local papers do too. It has a huge influence. And we'd love to challenge it.

Journalism is straying into entertainment. The lines between serious news segments, news entertainment, and news comedy are blurring.

Well-reported news is a public good; bad news is bad for everyone.

The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.

The front pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times are very important in shaping what other people think. They're like writing a memo to the White House.

The power is to set the agenda. What we print and what we don't print matter a lot.

For anyone in the news business, just the name 'Cronkite' conjures up images of a bygone era when journalists covered, and could at times impact, the most important stories of the day, rather than the most 'compelling' or salacious.

In the cable news arena, you have two partisan networks looking out for their viewers. I think CNN needs to look out for the rest of us.

We should always remember that Fox News will stick out like a sore thumb no matter what the other news outlets do, and that has to be recognized as an issue.

In the United States, the mainstream news outlets like to portray themselves as observers, content to let events play out without interference. But in Britain, where crusading journalistic campaigns are part of the tradition, it is far more acceptable for reporters to become active participants, with a specific outcome in mind.

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

The media have such a strong hand in deciding what people's perceptions are. They decide what the agenda is going to be, what the issues are.