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Frank Bruni

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Famous Frank Bruni Quotes

“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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“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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“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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