Bill Keller Quotes

“Whether or not Twitter makes you stupid, it certainly makes some smart people sound stupid.”

— Bill Keller

The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington, who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come.

— Bill Keller

“People crave trustworthy information about the world we live in. Some people want it because it is essential to the way they make a living. Some want it because they regard being well-informed as a condition of good citizenship. Some want it because they want something to exchange over dinner tables and water coolers.”

— Bill Keller

“Everything is accessible to everyone all the time, and I think there are wondrous things to treasure with what the Internet has made available to journalists. But I think it's also had some effects that are less pleasant. It has chipped away at a sense of privacy and secrecy.”

— Bill Keller

I don't think fairness means that you give equal time to every point of view no matter how marginal. You weigh the sides, you do some truth-testing, you apply judgment to them.

— Bill Keller

“The most obvious drawback of social media is that they are aggressive distractions.”

— Bill Keller

“Every technology, including the printing press, comes at some price.”

— Bill Keller

“I don't think that there is absolute freedom of the press. We operate under laws - against libel, for instance. The idea that there is some absolute press freedom is kind of a myth.”

— Bill Keller

“Twitter and Facebook are brilliant tools, the journalistic uses of which are still being plumbed. They are great for disseminating interesting material. They are useful for gathering information, including from places that are inaccessible.”

— Bill Keller

“I do care if religious doctrine becomes an excuse to exclude my fellow citizens from the rights and protections our country promises.”

— Bill Keller

“My view of social media is that it is a set of tools, not a religion.”

— Bill Keller

Anyone with an Internet service provider can be a pundit or whatever they want.

— Bill Keller

There is something decidedly faux about the camaraderie of Facebook, something illusory about the connectedness of Twitter.

— Bill Keller

“Beating up on the so-called elite media has a nice populist ring to it.”

— Bill Keller

“Liberation movements - operating surreptitiously and conspiratorially - thrive on discipline and suspicion, and punish deviation or dissent.”

— Bill Keller

“I think there's a misconception that I'm opposed to social media.”

— Bill Keller

“One of the most important disciplines in journalism is to challenge your working premises.”

— Bill Keller

The curse of a journalist is that he always has more questions than answers.

— Bill Keller

“For all of the woes besetting our business, I believe with all my heart that newspapers - whether they are distributed to your doorstep, your laptop, your iPhone or a chip implanted in your cerebral cortex - will be around for a long time.”

— Bill Keller

“I think if you're a regular viewer of Fox News, you're among the most cynical people on planet Earth. I cannot think of a more cynical slogan than 'Fair and Balanced.'”

— Bill Keller

“I don't have dating tips.”

— Bill Keller

Every time my TweetDeck shoots a new tweet to my desktop, I experience a little dopamine spritz that takes me away from ... from ... wait, what was I saying?

— Bill Keller

I have nothing against conservative people putting out conservative commentary or doing conservative broadcasting, or liberal people doing liberal broadcasting, or conservative blogs or liberal blogs.

— Bill Keller

“In fact, I spent 25 years as a reporter, swearing I would never become an editor. Sitting at a desk, watching other people go out and find the story, and then fussing with other people's words - I just didn't get the appeal of that.”

— Bill Keller

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has on several occasions talked about transparency as an absolute principle. I don't personally believe that.

— Bill Keller

You don't want to go around willy-nilly suing news organizations. That's probably self-defeating.

— Bill Keller

“There's a lot of stuff they don't teach you in the mythical editors' school. They don't teach you that you're going to have to spend a lot of your life in crisis management.”

— Bill Keller

“Choosing my favorite moment in journalism would be like picking a favorite among my children. I can't pick one favorite.”

— Bill Keller

“I don't think anyone at Fox believes they are producing even-handed, impartial coverage.”

— Bill Keller

“I make a joke that I'm the Internet curmudgeon, but 'wary' is a good way to put it.”

— Bill Keller

“I'm a Capricorn, actually.”

— Bill Keller

Liberation movements - prizing ends over means - are not always particular about their friends or scrupulous about their transactions.

— Bill Keller

“My feeling about the Internet or anything else is that the more it tends to become a cult, the more I want to call it into question.”

— Bill Keller

The Democrats generally recoil from the subject of entitlements.

— Bill Keller

“I think there's been a decline in the public's access to what's being done with their tax dollars, what's being done in their name. I hope that that will be repaired.”

— Bill Keller

“If a candidate for president said he believed that space aliens dwell among us, would that affect your willingness to vote for him? Personally, I might not disqualify him out of hand; one out of three Americans believe we have had Visitors and, hey, who knows? But I would certainly want to ask a few questions.”

— Bill Keller

“My dad was an engineer, and he became the CEO of Chevron. His was an engineer's mind-set: Everything's kind of a problem; how do you approach the problem?”

— Bill Keller

Since September 11 2001, editors in America have faced some excruciating choices, as the attempt to wage a war against a new kind of enemy sometimes strained the boundaries of our laws and values.

— Bill Keller

“Buying an aggregator and calling it a content play is a little like a company's announcing plans to improve its cash position by hiring a counterfeiter.”

— Bill Keller

“There is a long history of newspapers being doomed. They were doomed by radio. They were doomed by television. They were probably doomed by the telegraph way back when.”

— Bill Keller

“There's no question that sources sometimes have interests aside from the truth when they talk to reporters. That's why reporters have to very aggressively report against their own theses and against their initial information.”

— Bill Keller

“Being an editor has been a source of great satisfaction, but writing is the thing I truly love.”

— Bill Keller

“It's a considerable source of tragedy in the world that people stay in powerful jobs long past the point where they're a spent force.”

— Bill Keller

“I may be the old-media id, but I think I may be entitled to some credit for being a new-media pioneer.”

— Bill Keller

“I think Twitter is a fabulous tool. Crowd-sourcing by Twitter is useful in getting early warnings.”

— Bill Keller

One of the reasons that I'm a lurker on Twitter is that every time I tweet an idea, I feel like I'm delivering something to the competition that I ought to be giving to a reporter here.

— Bill Keller

“Casual reliance on unnamed sources ... corrodes our credibility and, in cases that are rare but not rare enough, may abet journalistic malpractice.”

— Bill Keller

Most recently, the President's reluctance to offend Senator Rick Santorum
a Catholic theocrat who believes that states should have the power to arrest gay lovers in their bedrooms, or even to criminalize couples who use contraceptives
was an occasion to wonder what, exactly, Mr. Bush was born-again into.

— Bill Keller

“Maybe we're all a little too desperate these days for a simple formula to explain how our safe world came unhinged. That, as much as anything, may explain one of the more enduring conspiracy theories of the moment, the notion that we are about to send a quarter of a million American soldiers to war for the sake of Israel.”

— Bill Keller

A vote for Mitt Romney is a vote for Satan.

— Bill Keller