I talk about things that are front page news.
The media are not progressive enough to let us govern. 24/7 news is the worst thing that has happened to the ability to govern.
I don't read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis.
I tell people: if it's in the news, don't worry about it, because by definition, news is something that almost never happens.
Well, news is anything that's interesting, that relates to what's happening in the world, what's happening in areas of the culture that would be of interest to your audience.
If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire,--thinnerthan the paper on which it is printed,--then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.
I think the 24-hour news cycle has helped exaggerate the differences between the parties. You can always find someone on TV somewhere carping about something. That didn't happen 20 years ago.
I don't know how much you follow current events. For some, there's not enough time to keep up on what's happening; for others, the news is too depressing, and peering too deeply fills one with boiling frustration all too quickly.
I had gone to all the big stories of the '80s, which was one of the most fertile times in American journalism, around the world and here as well.
News is the best drama on television because it's real.
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.
People feel overwhelmed by the news cycle, and by this nagging feeling that the kind of vitriol out of Washington is just not how we are supposed to act as a government, and as a nation.
A newspaper is complete. It is finished, sure of itself, certain. By contrast, digital news is constantly updated, improved upon, changed, moved, developed - an ongoing conversation and collaboration. It is living, evolving, limitless, relentless.
It was what became something of a pattern in the first couple of years of the Clinton White House and maybe even longer, where information would drip, drip, drip, drip, drip out which would keep stories alive, alive, alive.
Traditionally, what we in the news business do is cover what happened yesterday.
Television, radio, social media. The 24/7 news cycle plows forward mercilessly on our desks, in our cars and in our pockets. Thousands and thousands of messages and voices bombard us from the moment we wake, fighting for our attention. All we see and hear, all day long, is news. And most of it is bad.
Red lights, green lights, stop and go jive. Headlines, deadlines, jamming your mind.
Internet news cycles are by the minute, and any fool can take a headline from the Associated Press and send it out as news.
It's not a 24-hour news cycle, it's a 60-second news cycle now, it's instantaneous. It has never been easier to get away with telling lies. It has never been easier to get away with the glib one liner.
We now assume that when people turn on the evening news, they basically already know what the news is. They've heard it on the radio. They've seen it on the Internet. They've seen it on one of the cable companies. So that makes our job a bit different.
Every morning at seven o'clock [you] spend an hour and a half figuring out what you are going to do to get on the news that night.
On 'The Daily Show,' we get so caught up in the day-to-day news cycle. A story breaks, and then the piranhas in late night, we all jump to the headline, and we dissect it, and then we have to move on to the next day.
We're in this industry, we feel like we need to be plugged into a news cycle all day long. You feel like if you're not commenting on the news 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you're not going to be relevant.
Cable news is 24 hours long, so you have to fill it up with something.
My stint as general manager of MSNBC made me particularly sensitive to how the big stories are covered.
