"What is news? It's hard to quantify. Certainly news has changed completely, and the morning shows are not really designed to bring you the news, except to tell you what happened overnight, and the rest of it is a kind of magazine mentality - a little bit of this, a little bit of that. It's harder to be an educated and informed citizen"
About this Quote
The key move is how he frames “news” as “hard to quantify.” That’s not evasiveness, it’s an admission that the category has been bent by incentives. Morning shows promise information, then deliver a playlist: headlines as weather, tragedy as a segment, politics as vibe. “A little bit of this, a little bit of that” is Ford’s plainspoken shorthand for the attention economy before we started calling it that. The subtext is that fragmentation isn’t just a stylistic choice; it’s a business model. If the product is your time, the goal is to keep you pleasantly tugged from topic to topic, never bored enough to leave, never focused enough to demand more.
His final line sharpens the stakes without preaching: “harder to be an educated and informed citizen.” Citizenship here isn’t a feeling, it’s a practice that requires continuity, context, and the patience to sit with complexity. Ford’s lament doubles as a quiet indictment of viewers too: if we accept news as ambiance, we shouldn’t be surprised when democracy starts to feel like one, too.
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Ford, Harrison. (2026, January 15). What is news? It's hard to quantify. Certainly news has changed completely, and the morning shows are not really designed to bring you the news, except to tell you what happened overnight, and the rest of it is a kind of magazine mentality - a little bit of this, a little bit of that. It's harder to be an educated and informed citizen. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/what-is-news-its-hard-to-quantify-certainly-news-143941/
Chicago Style
Ford, Harrison. "What is news? It's hard to quantify. Certainly news has changed completely, and the morning shows are not really designed to bring you the news, except to tell you what happened overnight, and the rest of it is a kind of magazine mentality - a little bit of this, a little bit of that. It's harder to be an educated and informed citizen." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/what-is-news-its-hard-to-quantify-certainly-news-143941/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"What is news? It's hard to quantify. Certainly news has changed completely, and the morning shows are not really designed to bring you the news, except to tell you what happened overnight, and the rest of it is a kind of magazine mentality - a little bit of this, a little bit of that. It's harder to be an educated and informed citizen." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/what-is-news-its-hard-to-quantify-certainly-news-143941/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2026.



