Quotes About News

News at Work is a vivid, inside look at the collision of print journalism and electronic media. Based on close access to the leading news organizations in Buenos Aires, Boczkowski documents how contemporary journalism is caught in the grip of emulation; this spiral of imitation exacerbated further by global news media and their intensifying homogenization. The portrait of this transformation of the news is both fascinating and deeply worrying, and is guaranteed to provoke debate.

When the media had their monopoly and they determined what was news and what wasn't news and when they determined what commentary the news was, that's all it was. But my show came along in 1988 and blew up that monopoly.

We don't have the Democrats doing a Fox News debate. They have decided they want to boycott Fox News, at least this election cycle. I don't see Hillary and Bernie Sanders doing a Fox News debate. And they should. We have great journalists on this network. I'm an opinion person. It wouldn't be me - that I think would do a great job. But if they're not going to put themselves in an environment like this, do you have to now reconsider, in other words, going forward, that maybe these liberal networks don't deserve the access to these candidates?

I got an idea: people like news why don't we write the news down on a piece of paper, and we'll gas them up and drive them to everyone's house. I mean, if you were going to say that now, it doesn't sound like a great idea, because there are other ways you can distribute the news.

The brutality of the pace. This was my third presidential campaign and it was a thousand times faster paced than my first one in 2004. The news cycle is constant and there has been an explosion in the number of news outlets covering them. As as result we're witnessing news and entertainment melding together to create what I'd describe as the "American Idolization" of campaigns and politics.

The difference does not lie in the things that news does that novels do not do, but in the things that novels do that news cannot do. In other words, this basic technique of news - just one among many - is something a novel can use, but a novel can deploy a multitude of other techniques also. Novels are not bound by the rules of reportage. Far from it. They're predicated on delivering experience.

One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles.

So many people are looking for news on the go. If you really want to understand the world, you're not going to by consuming news in the form of bite-sized haikus. I'm sorry to step up on a soapbox, but I have strong feelings about this.

Hundreds upon hundreds of news outlets - okay, thousands - are interested in following the happenings at the White House. Yet the number of news sources at the White House - people who know what's happening - is finite. Dozens maybe. With that imbalance hanging over the enterprise, it's hard for a group of reporters competing against one another to secure the upper hand.

News Coverage!! As news expose rather than cover events.

The real news has gotten more surreal and absurd, and my fake news, if you want to call it that, has gotten more plausible. And at some point, those two trend lines crossed.

"The New York Times" is reporting correctly that women had accused a presidential candidate of sexual assault. Now that's news on any level. I mean you can't argue that that's not news.

The positive news is that the British economy is continuing to grow and is creating jobs. And it is positive news too that at a time of real international instability we are a safe haven in the storm.

It's lamented that the youth get their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. It's lamentable that they get more from them than from the news.

News is like the tilefish which appears in great schools off the Atlantic Coast some years and then vanishes, no one knows whither or for how long. Newspapers might employ these periods searching for the breeding grounds of news, but they prefer to fill up with stories about Kurdled Kurds or Calvin Coolidge, until the banks close or a Hitler marches, when they are as surprised as their readers.

It is still news to her that passion could steer her wrong though she went down, a thousand times strung out across railroad tracks, off bridges under cars, or stiff glass bottle still in hand, hair soft on greasy pillows, still it is news she cannot follow love (his burning footsteps in blue crystal snow) & still come out all right.

The good news isn't that God is victorious. How can He not be victorious? The good news is we can be victorious, too.

I think it's fair to point out that there is bias in the media on both sides, both right and left. And that it's very hard to find objective news because we have gotten, particularly as you watch cable news, it's so dominated by opinion.

An unspeakable tragedy, confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City: John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous, perhaps, of all the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival. Hard to go back to the game after that news flash, which in duty bound, we have to take.

Machines have given us a new ability to count and make our understanding quantitative. The Web connects news gatherers with audiences in ways that were never possible before and can bring a breadth of intelligence, and experiences to understanding the news we never had. And professional reporters and editors still have a unique role to play in triangulating those inputs as well as bringing three other distinct skills - access to interrogate people in power, exceptional storytelling skills, and a discipline of open minded, skeptical inquiry - which are not as likely to be found elsewhere.

But violence is news, to a certain extent, and people don't want complicated news. Because as soon as you realize things are complicated, your life becomes more complicated.

The good news is your surgery was a success and now you look like a movie star! The bad news is that movie star is Drew Carey!

If the gospel isn't good news for everybody, then it isn't good news for anybody.

News is that which comes from the North, East, West and South, and if it comes from only one point on the compass, then it is a class; publication and not news.

The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if it were.

One had the right to write because other people needed news of the inner world, and if they went too long without such news they would go mad with the chaos of their lives.

Some days the competition would beat me and I'd go home thinking awful thoughts, want to hide under the bed, depressed. But of course, in the news business, when you're working a daily news broadcast, you get your victories and defeats every day.

I could've written songs about, for example, the Paris attacks as they happened and have the song out the day after, but doing this project and following the news made me realize how much I miss deeper nuances in the news reporting. There's already so many quick opinions and angles being thrown in your face, so I avoided writing about things like that and tried focusing on the smaller, more seemingly insignificant things. The things you would find in the back of the newspaper or the back of your mind.

Desperate times call for desperate measures" is an aphorism which here means "sometimes you need to change your facial expression in order to create a workable disguise." The quoting of an aphorism, such as "It takes a village to raise a child," "No news is good news," and "Love conquers all," rarely indicates that something helpful is about to happen, which is why we provide our volunteers with a disguise kit in addition to helpful phrases of advice.

Bad news travels fast. Good news takes the scenic route.

I think there'd be huge losses if there weren't newspapers. I know everything's shifting to the Internet and some people would say, 'News is news, what you're talking about is a change of consumption, not the product that's out there.' But I think there is a change.

To a journalist, good news is often not news at all.

The British media is sinking down, as the American news media has lowered the bar for all of humanity. British news media is definitely trying to stoop down to that level. Everyone is stooping to the lowest common denominator.

My big "double-aha" moment came while anchoring the national news at CBS News. It was at the height of the recession, and on top of the usual negative stories, my newscasts became full of especially heart wrenching stories of people losing their homes, jobs, and retirement savings. Starting the morning off like that could leave even the most optimistic person feeling helpless and hopeless. The lightning bolt came when we changed how we talked about the negative.

You cover the bad news about America. You do. But you don't get up in the morning hating your country. And so, until somebody shows me lines at the border trying to get out, I think there's some good news.

Political reporters no longer get to decide what's news. The days when a minister gave briefings to a dozen lobby correspondents, and thereby dictated the next day's headlines, are over. Now, a thousand bloggers decide for themselves what is interesting. If enough of them are tickled then, bingo, you're news.

People may like what third-party candidates say, because often they are the only ones saying anything, but they usually won't vote for someone who doesn't have a chance. Since third-party candidates are not in the news, they are considered to be not really in the race; and since they are not in the race, this justifies treating them as if they are not news.

The bad news is that only the bad people reach the news because they are noisier.

Twenty-two percent of Americans say their primary news source is Fox News. It's divided our country in a way that we haven't been divided probably since the Civil War, and its empowered large corporations to get certain kinds of politicians and ideologues who are in the United State Congress elected -- the Tea Party ideologues who control the Republican Party.

So we go, so little knowing what we touch and what touches us as we talk! We drop out a common piece of news, "Mr. So-and-so is dead, Miss Such-a-one is married, such a ship has sailed," and lo, on our right hand or on our left, some heart has sunk under the news silently - gone down in the great ocean of Fate, without even a bubble rising to tell its drowning pang. And this - God help us! - is what we call living!

The New York Times distorts and defrauds the news and then claims to be impartial. They never give an even-handed version of the news - that's the last thing they'd ever do.

There are lots of reasons fewer people are watching network news, and one of them, I'm more convinced than ever, is that our viewers simply don't trust us. And for good reason. The old argument that the networks and other `media elites' have a liberal bias is so blatantly true that it's hardly worth discussing anymore. No, we don't sit around in dark corners and plan strategies on how we're going to slant the news. We don't have to. It comes naturally to most reporters.

I think the press has an interest in communicating to its viewers or readers, and their viewers or readers drive profit for those news organizations, so I think those news organizations have a certain bias toward their own readers. Yeah, I think they are a special interest. Of course they are.

My personal beliefs were shaped more by experience and by watching the news when I was young: images of angelic-looking college students in Mississippi crying like the world was ending because black people were being allowed on their campus; the slow mounting horror of Vietnam on the evening news every night; sitting with my parents in front of the TV and being appalled at the way the Chicago police were treating the protesters during the '68 Democratic convention. Being eyed with suspicion because of my age and the way I wore my hair.

I know how to turn it on [computer]. I know where the disc goes: in that little slot but I can't always get it out. And I have three genius-level computer savvy kids who save my ass all the time. I'll tell you what I don't do. I don't watch the news on TV anymore. I get my news online. And like all of you, I Google whoever I want.

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 CNN who really should hold Trump accountable. And because they are trading the short-term fix of increased ratings by focusing on Trump drama - and I'm not saying they shouldn't cover the Russian investigations, of course they should - but the blanket coverage, it's not about news values. It is about ratings. And it comes at a tremendous cost because Trump supporters are fully defended against this. As far as they're concerned, this is a vast conspiracy, it's fake news, it doesn't impact their daily lives, it makes them see Trump as a victim, which he wants to be seen as.

People are consuming the news that is comfortable for them, not necessarily the news that is real or that they need to know.