Media Scrutiny Quotes

Does General Grant think I care what the newspapers say?

It took me a good decade of hiding in my house and not going outside to even, like, get my arms around this idea of celebrity, where suddenly people are looking for you to pick your nose or get a shot of you kissing some woman. It's a very discombobulating thing.

I don't worry about being bothered by the media. Either I'm going to talk or not talk.

The media tried to destroy my parents and has taken things completely out of context, but there's not a whole lot you can do in terms of fighting back. You have to hope that it passes, which it always does. But they have to be careful. They didn't necessarily sign up for this.

Even though the press at times made me completely crazy as they followed me around the hall, and asked tough questions over and over again - now believe me, every politician feels this way - it is a necessary part of our life, and we must have a press that isn't cowed and won't be afraid of ratings if they get put to the back of the room at a press conference.

When you get into the public eye, one day, you're kind of unknown, and the next day, you have people in your bushes waiting to take a picture of you.

Every year at this time I join a growing number of journalistic flagellants in enumerating things that I got wrong in the previous annum's worth of columns.

Pretty much every other question I get from fans is about my hair and beard.

Investigative reporting is not a way to make friends.

We journalists are never so idiotic as when we analyze things that we shouldn't be analyzing.

I love how me deciding to not continue doing 'LA Ink' turns into being 'cancelled.'

The media is always looking for a story of one kind or another.

I just don't feel comfortable anymore with the kind of attention that I'm getting. It's purely the numbers of people that want a bit of the Cure or want a bit of me.

There was a patriotic fervor and the Administration used it so that if you challenged anything you were made to feel that there was something wrong with that.... And there was even almost a patriotism police which, you know, they'd be up there on the internet sort of picking anything a Christiane Amanpour, or somebody else would say as if it were disloyal... Especially right after 9/11. Especially when the war in Afghanistan is going on.

I'm not trying to take Cate Blanchett down.

There's an old joke that politics is Hollywood for ugly people. An awful lot of the press coverage about Washington reads like coverage of Hollywood. Madonna is having some spat with Sean Penn. Who cares? And who cares which politician is mad at that politician?

People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher — a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.

I had heard that in Bollywood, one gets publicity without even asking for it. There are new rumours every day and the celebrities involved get disturbed.

In Spain you can't do anything. If you drive, everyone recognises you; at a restaurant you have paparazzi outside.

People are much more inclined to believe and say bad things about you if you're famous.

For the most part, I hang out in my back yard with my dog, but there's no paparazzi trying to check that out.

The fact that many journalists approach the Clintons - especially Hillary Clinton - with a presumption that she has done something that if it's not outright corrupt is at least worthy of looking into, inevitably colors the way the public views the former secretary of state, and the way they respond to her in the polls.

The press, many-tongued, surpassed itself in reproaches upon these women who had so far departed from their sphere as to speak in public.

At Duke, the coaches would cover up for you. But with the Wolves, something happens and it's in the papers, and I'm blamed. Things are run differently here - the wrong way, if you ask me. One man wants to blame another.

She was very kind to us when Joe and I went through the darkest days of the leak of my name in 2003. And, of course, Joe worked in the Clinton White House.