Political Journalists Quotes

The media increase the political nastiness while distancing voters from those clashes. Citizens become spectators. ­Headline-­driven news emphasizes the extremes, the fights, the hysteria, the sensational. Political reporters, trying to appear objective by quoting two opposing sides to almost every story, mostly sharpen the differences, slighting any centrist position.

There is a permanent war between journalists and the political classes.

At a time when politics has become an almost minute-by-minute spectacle, political thinkers who try to discern a sweeping interpretive pattern in current events or to predict where those events may be heading are likely to find their work evaluated in terms dismayingly like those applied to candidates and strategists. One wrong guess, or an abrupt change in the political weather, can make even an illuminating political book seem as irrelevant as a bungled campaign.

Most political journalists come to Washington because they're snappy writers, big thinkers, or news breakers. Me? My ticket to the big leagues had little to do with talent. It was mostly about the governor I was covering, Bill Clinton.

In the end, I did not feel any cleaner than he was … I pretended once again now and then that [Senator Joseph] McCarthy was not a serious man; but I always knew that the devil in me and the larger devil in him were very consequential figures indeed

If there is a constant to the American campaign story, it is that elites can’t predict the future very well. News is what surprises us, which is why the political press always has news. Voters are always undoing our certainties.

My parents, particularly my father, had been used by commentators, political journalists and political commentators, to attack me, and the collateral damage was the reputations of my father and my mother.

Political journalists, socially inept or no, are not nerds. Most of them can't do math, a fact that campaigns and politicians regularly exploit.

Political journalists love graduate student intelligence, the ability to make clever allusions in seminars, and in 1999-2000, they hassled George W Bush for not having it. They didn't realise what this book succinctly displays: that the president has something far more important - CEO intelligence, the ability to ask tough questions, garner essential information and make discerning decisions.