Frank Bruni Quotes

I suppose there are people who can pass up free guacamole, but they're either allergic to avocado or too joyless to live.

Books are personal, passionate. They stir emotions and spark thoughts in a manner all their own, and I'm convinced that the shattered world has less hope for repair if reading becomes an ever smaller part of it.

In some perfect world where human nature is less messy and history less fraught, any and all people who had ever suffered discrimination would find common cause, gathering together under one big anti-bigotry banner.

[Gore] tended to drone on and on, in singsong, narcotizing cadences best endured by the heavily caffeinated.

We are spending so much time in studios, and in chairs listening to somebody at a lectern, and if we really understood what Americans were concerned about and what resentments were building, we would not have been as shocked by Donald Trump's success.

We've given people both in print and even more so on TV these enormous doses of Donald Trump because people are consuming enormous doses of Donald Trump. If we had gotten a signal that John Kasich got as big an audience, believe me, you would have seen a lot more of John Kasich so it's complicated who's to blame, the media or the people consuming the media.

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.

Campaigns waged with lies presage governments racked by distrust. The sclerosis starts there.

After all, a creature without passionate conviction doesn't cling to extremes. He surveys the scenery and makes sure his outfit doesn't clash.

But fairness is where we’re heading, at least in regard to marriage, which has emerged as the terrain on which Americans are hashing out their feelings about gays and lesbians. The trajectory is undeniable. The trend line is clear. And the choice before the justices is whether to be handmaidens to history, or whether to sit it out.

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.

Shiatsu, deep-tissue or maybe even Rolfing: Which manner of pummeling becomes a cephalopod most?

We need to talk to voters in large enough numbers and we need to have conversations that are probing and sustained enough that we understand where they're coming from because nothing is nonsensical. You know, in a democracy, in an election, in an electorate there's a reason why things are happening and it's incumbent upon us to delve deep enough to get at those reasons.

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.

I wanted us to be careful about, going to the corner diner, interviewing three people and saying, "here's the mood of the public."

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think the Donald Trump's obsession is, is bigger than just polling. I mean it's funny because we've been harping on polls like never before, Trump was harping on his own polls endlessly. I mean his stump speeches would begin with him crowing about his latest poll numbers and that was just a kind of odd convergence.

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.

I think the media has to continually remind itself, and I think we do but sometimes not well enough that we're not just an economic property.

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?

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.

Another way in which our system is unfair. Why do Iowans get so much of a bigger voice every four years than everybody else? Ditto for New Hampshire. There are proposals and it could well happen that we could have a rotating calendar where different years different states went first. I would endorse that.

If you look at why do we end up with the nominees that we get often? It's because you have only a very small number of Americans participating in the primaries, and those people tend to be your most dyed in the wool partisans.

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.

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.

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.

I think what we journalists too often do is we assume the status quo is unchangeable. I think all sorts of issues of political reform, electoral reform need more discussion than they get.

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?

If every four years in a presidential election, if you're a New Yorker or a Californian, and you realize that you are so much less important, that nobody is actually kind of targeting your needs because they're laser-focused on what will play in Florida and on what will play in Virginia.

Are you telling me that the polite little note I sent my college alumni magazine has, by some unbeknownst series of errors, come to be printed in The Paper of Record, instead? What a fiasco!