Media Simplification Quotes

I have been saying for many years that we are using the word 'guru' only because 'charlatan' is too long to fit into a headline.

The mainstream media tend to lump everything together. To them, there's no difference between Madonna, the Rolling Stones, or whatever.

It's not the rules everywhere, you know? That's not the rules everywhere - that things have to be dumbed down in order to become massively popular. And that hasn't always been the rule, even in America.

True-crime shows and podcasts aren't the only ones flattening the complexity of forensic science into easy-to-grasp narratives: journalists do so, too. They say DNA or trace evidence 'matches' a suspect, when scientists can't be so definitive.

On TV, the nitty-gritty of trials takes place between commercial breaks, whereas, of course, reality is infinitely more complex. True crime also makes us more empathetic.

Clinton is a big personality who has led a big life, and for some of the media conventional wisdom to boil it down to a view that 'all people are really interested in' are a few moments of madness in the Oval Office gets him, the importance of the presidency, and the significance of his life, all wrong.

I think the problem with visual media like TV is that they're reductive.

You don't need 70 people in a White House press conference to tell people what happened there. You need a camera and maybe a couple reporters, and that's it.

But violence is news, to a certain extent, and people don't want complicated news. Because as soon as you realize things are complicated, your life becomes more complicated.

Too often, politics is like bad theater. The mass media simplifies stories and personalities into their most basic, digestible and familiar bits. Listeners prefer songs they have heard before, after all.

Politics ... is going to be diluted down into a 10-second window, where you whack the guy as hard as you can and then get out of there.

Among all the complaints you hear these days about the crimes of the media, it seems to me the critics miss the big one. It is that especially TV, but also we of the print press, tend to reduce mess and complexity and ambiguity to a simple story line that doesn't reflect reality so much as it distorts it. ... What bothers me about the journalistic tendency to reduce unmanageable reality to self-contained, movielike little dramas is not just that we falsify when we do this. It is also that we really miss the good story.

Media generally likes to generalise things, as it makes their life easy.

It's a closing of the mind that happens when you want to be lazy and go with the easiest answers, like the media do all the time in their sound bytes.

There is a tendency to try to dumb everything down and turn everything into a one-paragraph press release or even less, just a slogan.

When you take a subject and reduce it to something like a four-second sound bite and a check mark on a ballot, I think that that's inappropriate and insensitive.