I think watching the TV news is bad for you. It is bad for your physical health and your mental health.
I've known Owen's father Ron [Suskind] for years, and this was based on his best-selling book ["Life, Animated"]. We worked together as journalists at ABC-TV News, and I knew about the book since its inception. Before he finished it, he approached me and said he thought it would make a great documentary, and I agree with him, and moved forward from there.
Anytime it was advertised that I was going to be at a particular place, the radicals would be there, the cameras with TV news.
I do not mean to be the slightest bit critical of TV newspeople, who do a superb job, considering that they operate under severe time constraints and have the intellectual depth of hamsters. But TV news can only present the "bare bones" of a story; it takes a newspaper, with its capability to present vast amounts of information, to render the story truly boring.
Local television and local TV news isn't telling the voters about local candidates.
Watching violence in movies or in TV programs stimulates the spectators to imitate what they see much more than if seen live or on TV news. In movies, violence is filmed with perfect illumination, spectacular scenery, and in slow motion, making it even romantic. However, in the news, the public has a much better perception of how horrible violence can be, and it is used with objectives that do not exist in the movies.
Surveys have shown going back as far as you and I can remember that people have perceived a leftward tilt in the basic coverage that they get on TV news.
I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories.
The local TV news is the greatest danger in your life. It's all crap.
I've reported in countries where leaders not only complain about a critical press, but also try to shut it down, throwing reporters in prison or worse. I've seen my colleagues risk their lives and, with increasing frequency, lose their lives in their pursuit of the truth. We are not about to stop doing our jobs because yet another president is unhappy with what he reads or hears or sees on TV news. There is a reason the founders put freedom of the press in the very first amendment to the Constitution.
There has to a certain responsibility, whether it's TV news, online news, to sort out opinion from fact.
Cynics will say there are no good people out there. And if you read the papers and watch TV news you could be convinced of that. But there are good people.
TV news is as bloody as Shakespeare but without the intelligence and the poetry. If you watch television news you know less about the world than if you drank gin out of a bottle
