Bieber is the first mega YouTube star, born inexplicably out of a novel and disruptive medium. It has, of course, always been so for pop culture: feverish bubbles, silly novelty acts and disconcerting new forces impose themselves on a reluctant and condescending media. Michael Wolff Read Quote
Bill de Blasio, for his part, became the mayor of New York, surely the most powerful local political position in the nation, and arguably – after Giuliani and Bloomberg – one with a national base, one with, practically speaking, no job at all. He went from marginal political flotsam and jetsam to extraordinary centrality within a few months time. Michael Wolff Read Quote
Here’s a certainty: When you play out your personal dramas, hurt and self-interest in the media, it’s a confection. You say what you have to say in the way you have to say it to give it media currency – and that’s always far from the truth. Often, in fact, someone else says it for you. It’s all planned. It’s all rehearsed. Michael Wolff Read Quote
If institutions don’t grow, they… well, I don’t know what happens to them, because they always grow. I suppose the point is that we forget about the ones that don’t. Michael Wolff Read Quote
One of the great business virtues of high publishing was that it was a difficult business to enter. You had to stand for something. Michael Wolff Read Quote
How advertising is handled has always been a key distinction between low and high order publishing. The higher you stood, the more separate you were from advertising, and, in the logic of snobbery, the greater a premium price the top brands would pay to be in your company. Michael Wolff Read Quote
One of the anomalies of digital journalism is a lack of clarity between high and low. That’s the historic distinction in publishing, mass from class, the vulgar from the refined, tabloid from broadsheet, the penny press from papers costing a nickel. Michael Wolff Read Quote
If you run for president and lose, you promote yourself into all sorts of more lucrative, possibly more influential and surely more fun media opportunities. Michael Wolff Read Quote
As a journalist – or as a writer – my obligation is to come as close to the truth as I possibly can. And that’s not as close to someone else’s truth, but the truth as I see it. Michael Wolff Read Quote
Politics is a literal game. Every word must represent a strict view – or be so abstract as to be meaningless. Michael Wolff Read Quote
