A Quote by Max Brooks

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.
Doctors have a really big fear of looking unprofessional. I've always said that if you're a professional person, you'll never come off looking unprofessional, whether it's social media or something else.
Media bias in editorials and columns is one thing. Media fraud in reporting 'facts' in news stories is something else. ...The issue is not what various journalists or news organizations' editorial views are. The issue is the transformation of news reporting into ideological spin, along with self-serving taboos and outright fraud.
Now your kids can't escape. Thirteen-year-olds back then, if they didn't watch the evening news, they didn't see news. If they didn't watch the 6:30 or seven p.m. news, they didn't see news. Today younger people have much more access to that kind of hard news than you did when you were 13 back then.
Uriah drops his tray next to me. It is loaded with beef stew and chocolate cake. I stare at the cake pile. “There was cake?” I say, looking at my own plate, which is more sensibly stocked than Uriah’s. “Yeah, someone just brought it out. Found a couple boxes of the mix in the back and baked it,” he says. “You can have a few bites of mine.” “A few bites? So you’re planning on eating that mountain of cake by yourself?” “Yes.” He looks confused. “Why?” “Never mind.
There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call "atheists," and those who think they are facts are "religious." Which group really gets the message?
I think I'm able to reach a lot of folks, despite the fact that the conventional news media sometimes says, "You know, this speech is too long," or "It's too complicated," or "He needs to have better sound bites," or what have you.
People know the facts of a story just as well as the people on TV do, and they have more platforms to hold the media accountable when they don't get it right. We are a world full of media experts. That's a great thing.
There are very few things I've ever been a part of that I believe in more than the Iran deal, and everything I said I believe to be true, and I was trying to make a case about the facts.
I think we - "we," meaning the media - have generally caused Americans to consume news in smaller, less contextualized bites. I think we have sugar-coated the news. I think we have provided news that is consumable, at the expense of news that is more important. I think we have created a world in which extreme views push out moderate views.
This is going to sound horrible, but I don't even know how much I make in a year. It must be, you know, a couple of million dollars, a few million. I know it's more money than my dad, a jail guard, made in his lifetime; more money than I'll ever need.
The news media are, for the most part, the bringers of bad news... and it's not entirely the media's fault, bad news gets higher ratings and sells more papers than good news.
People who travel in China tell me that the mood there is still very upbeat, because their media is different from our media. Chinese media emphasize how well things are going and suppress the bad news and publish the good news.
Today enormous effort goes into convincing the American public that we're just consumers of media manipulation and sound-bites and spin doctors. That we care only about ourselves, money, and stuff. That acting out of passion and conviction doesn't make a difference. But all history shows that it does.
In this age of micro-blogging and two second sound bites, almost no one has the attention span, or time, to read more than a few sentences.
Today there are a huge number of think tanks working on poverty-related issues; there are books written on the topic; and university centers being created to study poverty. But, at the same time, the media has a terribly hard time with this issue; it's very hard to convince editors and publishers to devote resources to complex investigations of the lives of America's poor. And, as a result, too often poverty is portrayed in stereotypes, in sound bites, in a few pat images rather than in its full Technicolor complexity and diversity.
When I do a record, it sounds more punk and raw. Or it will sound louder, or it will sound more shocking. Or mind-boggling. I'll be trying to figure it out, but once I've got it figured out I'll be like, I know this; I know where this came from. I think art is most interesting when the intention is not clear.
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