Quote

TV news has largely given Trump editorial control.

There are still journalists who risk their lives in situations of conflict, versus those who sit behind a desk at 'News of the World' to report on whether someone is going out with somebody or not.

A lot of people take shots at news channels.

Reporters do decide what is news, but they don't invent it, even if they sometimes become part of the story by risking their lives in a danger zone, as in the case of ABC's Bob Woodruff and Doug Vogt.

Reporters now are better educated than the crowd I knew when I broke in. We still had guys shaped by Prohibition and the Depression, so the news business still had badly paid people who loved it for the life, because every day was different.

We journalists are a bit like vultures, feasting on war, scandal and disaster. Turn on the news, and you see Syrian refugees, Volkswagen corruption, dysfunctional government. Yet that reflects a selection bias in how we report the news: We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off.

Honestly, everybody gets talked about. Some people control their press a little more than others. Some people feed the press and move it the way they want to. I don't do that.

What happens in the media is the cult of personality. The brands who have been forced to cut their staff have been forced to take on the brands of journalists.