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But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you - and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland. ---Newton Minow, previous Chairman of the FCC, 1961

I think that's a real difference between television and print, between broadcast and print, that whenever somebody says, ``No comment'' when they don't want to talk to a camera, they automatically look bad. And it makes the camera an inherently unfair weapon if they use that all the time. --- Ellen Goodman

Seeing a murder on television can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some. ---Alfred Hitchcock

Imitation is the sincerest form of television. ---Fred Allen

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.--- Edward R. Murrow

I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television. ---Gore Vidal

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book. ---Groucho Marx

All television is children's television. ---Richard P. Adler

Television is the first truly democratic culture, the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. the most terrifying thing is what people do want. ---Clive Barnes

Television is chewing gum for the eyes. ---Frank Lloyd Wright

Newsweek puts Geraldo on the cover with his broken nose so that Newsweek can sell more magazines. It's like being tabloid journalists without being responsible for it. --- Phil Donahue

What if it was cats who invented technology... would they have TV shows starring rubber squeak toys? ---Douglas Coupland

The bigger the information media, the less courage and freedom they allow. Bigness means weakness. --- Eric Sevareid

I don't think people ought to believe only one news medium. They ought to read and they ought to go to opinion journals and all the rest of it. I think it's terribly important that this be taught in the public schools, because otherwise, we're gonna get to a situation because of economic pressures and other things where television's all you've got left. And that would be disastrous. We can't cover the news in a half-hour event evening. That's ridiculous. -- Walter Cronkite

Were he still broadcasting, Walter Cronkite might end his newscast with "and that's the way we say it is" to better represent the tenor of today's news media. ---Connect magazine (Spring 1996)

If it weren't for electricity we'd all be watching television by candlelight. ---George Gobel

I guess I'm saying that I admire lonely print reporters, but I wouldn't want to be one. -- Mike Wallace

Ed Murrow didn't stride into the newsroom. He walked in slowly preoccupied, with his left hand in his pocket, right hand holding the cigarette, his head lowered, the weight of the world on his shoulders. He came in in his shirt sleeves. His pants rose to two points in the back where the suspenders buttoned, revealing the Savile Row tailoring. It was a noisy place, the newsroom. Everybody would be busy working, typing. When he came in, it was like the Red Sea parting. Everyone hushed and moved back as he walked through. It was not pomposity, just a presence, an awesome presence about the man. The spell was finally broken when he spoke to someone. ---Marvin Kalb

The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely. ---T. S. Eliot

I can get a better grasp of what is going on in the world from one good Washington dinner party than from all the background information NBC piles on my desk. ---Barbara Walters

Television: A medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well done. ---Ernie Kovacs

Television is a gold goose that lays scrambled eggs and it is futile and probably fatal to beat it for not laying caviar. ---Lee Loevinger

We don't care really about children as a society and television reflects that indifference to children as human beings. ---Bill Moyers

A nasty rumor is floating around that you were actually seen happy on two occasions, but your true friends know that is a rumor being spread by your enemies. ---Ann Gillis in a note to Edward R. Murrow

If you put a direct question, the interviewee will answer it as he has probably answered the same question dozens of times before. Then begins the waiting game. He thinks he has given you the definitive answer. You manage a slightly uncomprehending, puzzled expression, and you can watch his mind work. `You stupid oaf, if you didn't comprehend that, I'll put it in language you can understand' and proceeds to do so. Then, in the course of editing, you throw out the first answer and use the second one. ---Edward R. Murrow.

Television news provides no more than a kind of child's picture book of almost wordless moving images calculated to stir the emotions rather than the intellect. --- Ronald Payne

If you came and you found a strange man... teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you'd kick him right out of the house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don't think twice about it. ---Jerome Singer, Yale Psychology Professor

Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it. ---C.P. Scott

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. -- Dave Barry

They eat granola and when (women) say 'Let's go to the bar,' they mean the salad bar or the yogurt bar. ---Dan Rather on women in news.

You want to know what the girls on the bus talk about? Kids and PMS. --- Mary Matalin

Television is teaching all the time. Does more educating than the schools and all the institutions of higher learning. ---Marshal McLuhan

Television is basically teaching whether you want it to or not. ---Jim Henson

Good heavens, television is something you appear on, you don't watch. ---Noel Coward

We cannot blame the schools alone for the dismal decline in SAT verbal scores. When our kids come home from school do they pick up a book or do they sit glued to the tube, watching music videos. Parents, don't make the mistake of thinking your kid only learn between 9:00 am and 3:00 p.m. ---President George Bush

To harness the power of television for the education of our nation's children, everyone must get involved - television programmers, government leaders, teachers, and above all, parents. ---Edwin Newman

Television has a real problem. They have no page two. ---Art Buchwald

Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home. ---David Frost

Dictum on television scripts: We don't want it good - we want it Tuesday. ---Dennis Norden

Why should people pay good money to go out and see bad films when they can stay at home and see bad television for nothing. ---Sam Goldwyn

We're strip-mining our children's minds and we're doing it for commercial profit without any concern for the longer-term consequences for them and for our society. ---former Vice-President Albert Gore

Television, whether you like it or not, is the most powerful educational force known to man and we're quivering it away and I find that unacceptable. When are we going to scream, "That's enough!"? ---Fred Friendly

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