Matthew Felling Quotations

She will either wreck the evening news or rescue it.

Celebrity gossip has become like the blob in that (1958) Steve McQueen movie: It spreads everywhere it can. 'Entertainment Tonight' begat 'Access Hollywood.' TV people saw these two shows could succeed and created an entire channel for it.

I can't see a demand for a cable tier with no sports programming nor any of the big three cable news networks.

He leaves a lot to the imagination. That's manna from heaven for these comics.

I think 'Friends' ' success lies partly in the diversity of its characters but mostly 'Friends' enjoyed the benefits of a very weak decade in television entertainment. Were they on top? Were they champions? Sure, but the competition wasn't all that good to begin with,

That was really a retelling of an old tale at that point, and that's not what most people turn to news networks for.

The Oscar gap that exists between the academy and its audience isn't snobbery or liberal elitism as much as it reflects a different grading scale. Most moviegoers look for entertainment, while the academy looks for art.

(Broussard's comments) deserved an on-air correction, they did not deserve an on-air interrogation.

Are you getting more political information from Koppel or from Letterman? That's an interesting question,

Advocacy is calling for action. Aggressive reporting is calling for answers.

This is a rough story for journalists to cover because your journalism textbook has to take a back seat to your moral compass, and the coverage is visceral because of this. When people beg Chris Lawrence for help, they're forcing him to be not just a spectator but a reluctant leader.

It's an accumulation of things. In Iraq, it's the reality versus the perception and the whole debate of whether we're in the last throes of the insurgency or in for a dozen more years. The momentum has been building toward the media regaining its sea legs.

After the traffic stoppages have passed and the facts are rehashed, reporters are merely craning their necks and halting the normal pace of the news, ... There's 10 or 15 minutes of real news here and they're filling four hours with it. That's what most people have a problem with.

If there is a demand for family tiers, this is a very wobbly attempt.

I don't think Katrina is the turning point so much as 2005 is the turning point,

The media's credibility takes a short-term hit with these public corrections. But ... the media is becoming very skillful at policing itself - which will build its accuracy in the future.