Superficial Reporting Quotes

Useless, a superficial mindless recitation of what we know from the daily press.

They're all gonna be considered kooks and freaks and so forth. My point here is that many in the Drive-By Media, the faces that you see (sigh), they're just are repeating what's presented to them. They're repeating what they hear when they talk to other like-minded people.

The junk food of political journalism...all reshuffle stories are crap.

What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion.

Even when political reporting is not reduced to personality, political photography is. An article might offer depth and complexity, but is illustrated with a photo of one of the 10 politicians whose picture must be attached to every news story.

Journalists cover words and delude themselves into thinking they have committed journalism.

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 media has been very bad about informing us about what is going on. They focus on surface things. They do not focus enough on the fact that the Fourth Amendment is on life support and that we need a return to transparency in government.

Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

If you're gonna watch the Drive-By Media, don't take it seriously.

I don't go for the so-called "intimate" stuff. Column items that report: "Minerva Ferncroft sleeps in pink dusting powder between puce-colored sheets in a heart-shaped bed." It leaves me cold.

People accuse journalism of being too personal; but to me it has always seemed far too impersonal. It is charged with tearing away the veils from private life; but it seems to me to be always dropping diaphanous but blinding veils between men and men. The Yellow Press is abused for exposing facts which are private; I wish the Yellow Press did anything so valuable. It is exactly the decisive individual touches that it never gives; and a proof of this is that after one has met a man a million times in the newspapers it is always a complete shock and reversal to meet him in real life.

The judge is forced for the most part to reach his audience through the medium of the press whose reporting of judicial decisions is all too often inaccurate and superficial.

There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.

U.S.A. Today is what happens when the coupon section takes over the newspaper.

Foreign news is considered an expletive. Thoughtfully written analysis is out, 'live pops' are in. 'Action Jackson' is the cry. Hire lookers, not writers. Do powder puff, not probing interviews. Stay away from controversial subjects. Kiss ass, move with the mass, and for heaven and rating's sake, don't make anybody mad- - certainly not anybody you're covering, and especially not the mayor, the governor, the senator, the president or the vice-president or anybody in a position of power. Make nice, not news.

It's very hard to imagine anybody being president when the stuff that's written about them is empty of who they are.

Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our minds, nor in time.

You cannot penetrate events with reportage.

Television has a real problem. They have no page two.

I feel that the term "new age" is used by basically hostile media to diminish and marginalize a conversation that is very significant. It's held in place by journalists who are constantly looking for hooks and sound bites to keep them from having to make the effort of a deeper understanding and a more profound level of communication with the public.

Looking back, I still can't believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of 'experts' all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more 'shocking' and 'in-depth' than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do.