News Narrative Quotes

Yeah, that'll excite the media, what role will Bill [Clinton] have, versus the [Donald] Trump story. But in all of this, the key to remember is that we're not talking about media.

News, after all, is a spin of words and pictures. It's a kind of music. There are beats in a newscast, a newspaper story. Ed Murrow sounded like Ed Murrow. Huntley and Brinkley sounded different. Anderson Cooper, different still.

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

The Yahoo story is still being written.

In journalism, there are only two stories - "Oh, the wonder of it," and "Oh, the shame of it."

For years, we just accepted the premise that the reporters from that J-school mentality of neutrality and objectivity were just laying out the facts. We just assumed that Walter Cronkite was unbiased. In hindsight, it is clear that Walter Cronkite was biased, and that he used feigned objectivity as the cudgel to change the American narrative from being a right of center one to being a left of center one.

If you watch the news and don't like it, then this is your counter program to the news.

People want to have a voice and a say in what is news.

Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.

Big stories have lots of angles, and you have to decide what part of that story you want to address.

The current wisdom now is that if the three networks are covering the news the same way the difference is the anchor people. I think that won't be true in the future.

We still write too many stories that are "state of the race" stories that are informed almost solely by what the polling shows and by what we're then deducing about who's up, who's down, and I'm just not sure that's very helpful to readers, it certainly doesn't elevate the debate and, and the problem is if you, if you cover these things, and I don't think the Times is particularly culpable, I think other news organizations are worse, if you cover them in an entirely "who's up, who's down" horse race way.

Reporters may believe they control the story, but the story always controls the reporters.

Say you have a headline like "Mountain Bike Stolen," and then you read the story, read another story about it the next day, and then the next week, and then the next year. News is a process of expansion, the filling in of detail, and making narrative connections - not based on chronology, but based on features of the story. There are narrative connections made between props, between characters, between situations, and so forth.

What we call 'the news' always has tried to tell a story, and it's always told the story it wanted or, put most positively, whatever story it believed needed telling.