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Frank Bruni

Frank Bruni Books

Journalist

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“You can make a successful run for political office in this country without an especially thick résumé, any exceptional talent for expressing yourself, a noteworthy education or, for that matter, a basic grasp of science. But you better have religion. You better be ready to profess your faith in and fealty to God — the Judeo-Christian one, of course. And you better be convincing. A dust-up last week in the 2014 race for a United States Senate seat from Arkansas provided a sad reminder of this, showing once again that our ballyhooed separation of church and state is less canyon than itty-bitty crack.”

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“There’s a widespread conviction, spoken and unspoken, that the road to riches is trimmed in Ivy and the reins of power held by those who’ve donned Harvard’s crimson, Yale’s blue and Princeton’s orange, not just on their chests but in their souls. No one told that to the Fortune 500. They’re the American corporations with the highest gross revenues. The list is revised yearly. As I write this paragraph in the summer of 2014, the top ten are, in order, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Phillips 66, General Motors, Ford Motor, General Electric and Valero Energy. And here’s the list, in the same order, of schools where their chief executives got their undergraduate degrees: the University of Arkansas; the University of Texas; the University of California, Davis; the University of Nebraska; Auburn; Texas A&M; the General Motors Institute (now called Kettering University); the University of Kansas; Dartmouth College and the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Just one Ivy League school shows up.”

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Book:Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania
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“I don't know that it's a lack of creativity so much as it is , a lack of resources. And maybe a little bit of a lack of will but when you look at what fills every hour, let's just take CNN as an example, not because I think they're particularly egregious, but, they're sort of the ongoing hour, hour, hour. Why do they give us bulletins every single day on the latest poll? Very easy to cover a poll, right?”

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“I think with Donald Trump we're seeing the sort of utterly vanished line at long last of enter - between entertainment and politics. I mean there's always been an enormous dose of entertainment in politics. Trump has completely erased that line but the Trump phenomenon when it comes to where the media's culpability is how much we should be beating ourselves up, that's a complicated question because one of the distinctive features of our era is we know exactly what consumers are doing almost in real time.”

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“Writers and reporters need to remind themselves they're not to be judged solely by the number of clicks or eyeballs on a given story, but there is this other value and this other important mission, and the key is balancing the two so that you stay alive long enough, whether you're an individual writer or whether you're a whole news organization, to keep doing what you're doing but that you don't get so driven by that that you forget that what you're supposed to be doing in a higher sense is informing people, is elevating the debate and not lowering it.”

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“I can't speak for the news side 'cause I'm on the opinion side. But what I have noticed that the news side has done and, and to be really honest I think the news side pays too much attention to polls, but I think they're trying to restrain themselves by for instance there's a rubric called Poll Watch, um, that appears in a stream of a whole bunch of other political news where they can gather all that polling information for those people who really want it.”

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“We still write too many stories that are "state of the race" stories that are informed almost solely by what the polling shows and by what we're then deducing about who's up, who's down, and I'm just not sure that's very helpful to readers, it certainly doesn't elevate the debate and, and the problem is if you, if you cover these things, and I don't think the Times is particularly culpable, I think other news organizations are worse, if you cover them in an entirely "who's up, who's down" horse race way.”

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“You're encouraging a response in citizens and the public, that has nothing to do with an informed decision, that has nothing to do with policy, that has nothing to do with any of that but that just kind of turns it into a competition they're watching as if they're watching the Preakness or the Belmont Stakes and I think if we want people to make more cool-headed, sober-minded decisions covering elections as horse races is the antithesis of doing that.”

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“I do think we're in a little bit of a bubble and I think you saw it this year primarily in the fact that everyone was surprised by Donald Trump's success. He was saying things and he was tapping into feelings and resentments in the electorate that the media was almost completely blindsided by. And that suggests we are not spending enough time talking to people out there who are living the lives and feeling the problems that led them to Donald Trump.”

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“I remember going to a Trump rally in South Carolina, and it was really important and it was really interesting to talk to the people who'd shown up there because they were not caricatures, and so often Trump voters, Trump supporters were being portrayed in the media, probably I'm guilty of it as well, as caricatures. Each of these people, and I talked to maybe a dozen of them, had a very particular reason why he or she was supporting Donald Trump , but these were not casual, inexplicable decisions.”

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“The way the electoral college works, the way the states have kind of sorted themselves out in such a way that most states, the conclusion is foregone and there's no reason for the candidate to be there and for that reason, for that same, because of those same dynamics there's no reason for the journalist to be there combing the opinions of voters there because we know that California's gonna vote Democratic.”

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“You don't feel you have the same voice in a presidential election if you live in a solid blue or a solid red state. I also don't think we've educated voters well on the different ways in which primaries work in different states. It doesn't need to be the case that you end up with one Democrat and one Republican, you have open primaries, you can have jungle primaries. There are various permutations and combinations of how to do this.”

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“In terms of the rise of social media and the kind of discourse that it encourages, the kind of pointed attitude it encourages, in terms of the number of venues like our conversation here where reporters who are not technically opinion columnists are giving analysis that's invariably gonna edge into opinion. I think our journalism is getting much more almost European in terms of that, that ideal of objectivity exiting it.”

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“Even if you're trying to remain objective, even if you're trying not to mount any campaigns or endorse anything, when you cover an issue you are at least encouraging people to think about all the possibilities and if you're not covering political reform, electoral reform, you can write stories about them that don't say we must do this but just educate people on the fact that there are various advocates who are tugging us in that direction, that can present the arguments of those advocates, and I do think that's an issue we for some reason completely turned away from.”

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“We are constantly bemoaning that we have two nominees, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, who are when you put them together as unpopular a duo as we have ever had in our kind of Final Two for the presidency. There are reasons for that, regardless of who ends up winning and going into the White House, I think we need to take dig, those of us in the media, because we're the ones who can foster these discussion and ask the question what is it about the system that got us to a point where most of the people heading to the polls are holding their nose as they cast their vote?”

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“We have Americans who are voting for someone in whom they have confidence, about whom they have hope, because at after the election 2016 whoever wins is going to have to govern. And when you look at the tenor of this campaign, and when you look at the way people feel about these candidates and how partisan our country is for starters, how does the winner govern? I mean that's the real, real problem.”

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