News Focus Quotes

I think that the media spends far too much time [on personalities].

Cable news is more titillating to talk about who's up and who's down and all that nonsense as opposed to what's actually done.

The meek may one day inherit the earth, but not the headlines.

When you talk about President Trump, the cable networks turned over so many hours of prime time to him. Why? Because he was entertaining, but also because it drove ratings. And that is different from what the news media is supposed to focus on.

The sports page records people's accomplishments, the front page usually records nothing, but man's failures.

To the chagrin of many, the media gravitates towards controversy.

Well, the news is mostly about things that go wrong, right? It's about sensationalist incidents that happened today, instead of things that happen every day. So if you watch and follow a lot of the news, at the end of the day, you know exactly how the world is not working.

As a news person, you can't spend all your time responding to a Comedy Central star. It's not what we do.

In college, I got interested in news because the world was coming apart. The civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women's right movement. That focused my radio ambitions toward news.

Why are we so obsessed with celebrity culture? We have front-page news about divorces instead of front-page news about global warming, about women being abused, about children being abused. We're going on a downward spiral.

There is a type of snobbish, pompous journalist who thinks that the only news that has any validity is war, famine, pestilence or politics. I don't come from that school.

It is important to realize that a large percentage of what we hear or see on the news focuses on those places where there is violent conflict...It gives us a slightly or very distorted view of what is going on because there are many other parts of the planet where there is no violent conflict, but that is not on the news.

The news media tends to act like the kids on a young soccer team. We all follow the ball as it moves from one side of the field to the next - like a kids' soccer game. And the kid who ends up scoring a goal was the one who's off to the corner by himself just waiting for the opportunity.

When you think of Yahoo, they had a shot to be what Vox is doing, in terms of taking content and distribution, and really focusing on news, sports, finance - the things that uniquely Yahoo was really terrific at - and really build that whole flywheel.

I don't watch entertainment. I haven't watched in years. I want to see serious news.

I come from a financial news background, originally, so that is a big area of focus for me.