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Well, politics is much more severe than entertainment. You have to hit those points, in politics, word for word. You have to remember the date. You have to remember the website. You have to rehearse stories that might be asked, have anecdotes ready for questions that might come up.

There is a pool of references in New York and Los Angeles that are almost exclusively drawn from the media, from the world of television and advertising.

Without the media, the American people won't have the type of information they need to hold their leaders to account. The relationship between government and media has always been strained, and I think most of the time that's a healthy strain.

Nowadays you don't need to be a senator or a CEO or a celebrity to have a voice in the media, and if you happen to be a senator, a CEO or a celebrity, you have a thousand people each with their own respective audiences to hold you accountable.

I got overwhelmed by the magnitude of the celebrity culture in America. My background is as a news journalist, and newsrooms in the US are shrinking - investigation teams are being terminated or shrunk on newspapers all around the country. The one aspect that's expanded is coverage of celebrity culture.

It is not at all clear how much the media influences public opinion and how much public opinion influences the media.

Actors, like it or not, their voices carry deeply into the culture: people look towards them for attitudes, for right or wrong, and today, the mainstream media doesn't really balance the unheard.

I believe the most important thing for the media is to be objective, fair, and balanced. We should not report a story with preconceptions or prejudice.

Public opinion can be influential, the media can be influential.

There is so much media now with the Internet and people, and so easy and so cheap to start a newspaper or start a magazine, there's just millions of voices and people want to be heard.