Eric Alterman Quotes

But particularly when the media profess to strive toward objectivity, gatekeepers play a crucial role in helping people navigate the news to make educated political decisions.

Fox News is nothing if not impressive. No matter how harsh the criticism it endures, the network somehow always manages to prove itself even worse than we had previously imagined.

I am deeply devoted to the 27,000 songs I can take anywhere on my iPod Classic as well as the exquisitely engineered MacBook Air on which I typed this column.

Obama, like Carter, is reacting to warning signs by seeking to split the difference between dispirited Democrats and increasingly radicalized Republicans.

The Economist is undoubtedly the smartest weekly newsmagazine in the English language. I always look forward to its quirky year-end double issue.

Americans get mad as hell with reasonable frequency but quickly return to their families and sitcoms.

Warren Buffett pays taxes on a smaller percentage of his billions in income than his cleaning lady.

The myth of the liberal media empowers conservatives to control debate in the United States to the point where liberals cannot even hope for a fair shake anymore.

Over one in five American children is living in poverty, and the number is rising.

Face it, the system is rigged, and it's rigged against us.

Bringing democratic control to the conduct of foreign policy requires a struggle merely to force the issue onto the public agenda.

Mistakes, after all, are endemic to foreign and military policy given the unpredictability of events and the difficulty of securing reliable information in a place like Iraq.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with the tactics of the Occupy Wall Street movement, it's easy to understand the inspiration for its anger as well as its impatience.

Liberals do not appear to address potential solutions with anything like the far right's aura of God-given self-confidence.

The war on terrorism was a bait and switch operation.

History is replete with examples of empires mounting impressive military campaigns on the cusp of their impending economic collapse.

America's great newspapers have staffs that range from 50 percent to 70 percent of what they were just a few years ago.

Stylistically speaking, Barack Obama could hardly be further from Jimmy Carter if he really had been born in Kenya.

Few progressives would take issue with the argument that, significant accomplishments notwithstanding, the Obama presidency has been a big disappointment.

If liberalism has grown so weak and ineffective, why does it evoke such alarm on the part of conservatives? It turns out that while liberals are weak and spineless, they are also sneaky and clever.

Apple is a wonderful company for its customers and investors. So, too, Pixar. (NeXT, not so much...) But Apple is also an engine of misery for its subcontracted Chinese workers.

Certainly there are worse sins than doing everything possible to make your presidency matter.

Liberals believe that they can't get a fair shake from the media anymore.

While history never repeats itself, political patterns do.

For the past eight years, the right has been better at working the refs. Now the left is learning how to play the game.

President Obama has lowered taxes more than he has raised them, and they are today lower than they were in President Reagan's time. But you don't hear conservatives crowing about that.

American journalists tend to treat inequality as a fact of life. But it needn't be.

As with almost every significant aspect of the Bush presidency, its handling of 9/11 was a catastrophe from start to finish.

We live in a media world simultaneously obsessed with technology and personality.

Americans have always evinced some distrust of government, but the current situation has exacerbated this to a degree that may be unprecedented.

So was it a political mistake for Obama to put so many eggs in the health-care-reform basket? Well, a negative decision from the Supreme Court will certainly make it appear so.