News Agenda Quotes

What is news? It's hard to quantify. Certainly news has changed completely, and the morning shows are not really designed to bring you the news, except to tell you what happened overnight, and the rest of it is a kind of magazine mentality - a little bit of this, a little bit of that. It's harder to be an educated and informed citizen.

Not every item of news should be published: rather those who control news policies endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose.

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.

The media is done, they don't do journalism anymore, it's activism, nothing more, right?

I'm all news, all the time. Full power, tall tower. I want to break in when news breaks out. That's my agenda. Now, respectfully, when you start talking about a liberal agenda and all the, quote, 'liberal bias' in the media, I quite frankly, and I say this respectfully but candidly to you, I don't know what you're talking about.

As someone who's been covering presidential campaigns since the 1950s, I have no delusions about political reporting. Candidates bargaining access to get the kind of news coverage they want is nothing new.

As to the journalist himself, it is clear that to get a living he must write to order, that is, he must write in accordance with the views of his paper, in so far as he writes at all on current topics.

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

A handful of us determine what will be on the evening news broadcasts, or, for that matter, in the New York Times or Washington Post or Wall Street Journal. Indeed it is a handful of us with this awesome power.And those [news stories] available to us already have been culled and re-culled by persons far outside our control.

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

Whether you're talking about MSNBC or Fox or CNN, it's all about getting enough interest out there, sensationalizing the story in such a way that people are compelled to tune in.

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

Occasionally I'll watch Fox News for as long as I can tolerate it, or CNN. I'll watch until I get infuriated, but you got to know what they're talking about and what they're not talking about.

The New York Times - but the whole country gives it that weight. It's like the Asian kid in math class. Everybody in the media cheats off The New York Times.

We have witnessed a stunning reversal of power between mainstream and social media: The ability to go direct to end users of information through social channels radically disrupted the mainstream news agenda.

I think the press has an interest in communicating to its viewers or readers, and their viewers or readers drive profit for those news organizations, so I think those news organizations have a certain bias toward their own readers. Yeah, I think they are a special interest. Of course they are.

The media uses polls to create news stories. I think polls are just an extension of the editorial page, an excuse to get them on the front page. You can ask any question you want, get any answer you want, and then run around with that as a news story.

The lead story on MSNBC was the news that there was nothing new to report in the Gary Condit story. So remember when there is nothing new to report, MSNBC will be the station not to report it first.

As the news agenda goes into warp speed, it becomes ever more difficult for authors writing about current events to keep their books timely and relevant.

I think what irritates both conservatives and liberals alike is when news outlets pretend that they don't have an agenda but then clearly do, be it in the editorial decisions they make and the guests they have and the material that they cover.

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

One advantage to covering the Congress rather than the White House is that no one is controlling the agenda.

The media is the only business in the world where the customer is always wrong. If you're a news consumer, if you're a customer, and you complain to them, they will tell you that you are not sophisticated enough to understand what they do, and they're tell you to go listen or watch somewhere else. They're not even really doing the news for you. They're doing news for other journalists and other people in government because that's their real audience.

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.

I moved from current affairs to daily news over the Asia crisis of 1998 - mainly because the news agenda demanded I become economically literate.