Robert Scheer Quotes

We talk about a free press. These people hide, they make a lot of money off the media. They hide behind the slogans of free press, and then they can come out with crap like that. It's just garbage. It's insulting to the readers.

The journalist's job is to get the story by breaking into their offices, by bribing, by seducing people, by lying, by anything else to break through the palace guard.

I was a finalist for the Pulitzer as a reporter.

The publisher has told - you know, if these editors, Andres Martinez and Nick Goldberg, were the least bit honest about this, they would tell you the publisher has told them he wants the editorial page to be conservative.

What passes for investigative journalism is finding somebody with their pants down - literally or otherwise.

They know that the column resonates in the community. They know that people like it, and yet they don't have room for one column once week that consistently got it right.

Today anyone on the Internet can find out more about what you read, think, and earn than the secret police of Stalin or Hitler could have learned.

And the big issue here, I think, is that the publisher took over the editorial pages, a guy named Jeff Johnson. He's an accountant from Chicago, doesn't know anything about what newspapers are supposed to be about, and he made a decision to get rid of the column.

I've been with the paper for almost 30 years.

The decision came from the publisher. It certainly was cleared by Chicago. And then they come out with these fine sounding words about relation to readers and their obligation. It has nothing to do with that.

For example, I spent a lot of time with Reagan, both before he ran for governor and when he was running for president. As a print reporter without the cameras, I was able to really test the quality of their minds and their knowledge base.

The publisher Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word that I wrote. I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. Fortunately 60 percent of Americans now get the point but only after tens of thousand of Americans and Iraqis have been killed and maimed as the carnage spirals out of control. My only regret is that my pen was not sharper and my words tougher.

It's not easy to pull off the Big Lie
and George Bush has failed.

I talked to Reagan for about six hours all told. and Reagan was willing to go along with it. He didn't look at his watch, and he didn't allow his campaign aides to cut it off.

What Clinton severed with his welfare reform was the obligation of the federal government to step in when the states failed and to monitor these programs.

The fact is ... that when totalitarian nations like China and Saudi Arabia play ball with U.S. business interests, we like them just fine. But when Venezuela's freely elected president threatens powerful corporate interests, the Bush administration treats him as an enemy.

The paper nominated me 12 or 13 times for the Pulitzer Prize.

I was able to do something that people can't do these days, which is to have quality time with the guys who were trying to be president and a number of them who got the job.

The issue I highlight in the book is welfare reform.

Much of what candidates have to do is raise money and appeal to constituencies or interest groups that can provide that money.