TOP 20 Quotes Showing Lefty Journalists’ Contempt for Capitalism

■ “You wouldn’t expect someone who has written for the Monthly Review, The National Guardian, and The Daily Worker to have reported for The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times as well. But I have. [Socialist presidential candidate] Eugene V. Debs may be my all-time favorite American and Karl Marx my favorite journalist. But my employer for a decade was The Wall Street Journal, and for another decade it was the Los Angeles Times.”
— Then-journalism professor A. Kent MacDougall revealing his Marxist views in an article published in the November 1988 Monthly Review.

■ “Communism got to be a terrible word here in the United States, but our attitude toward it may have been unfair. Communism got in with a bad crowd when it was young and never had a fair chance…The Communist ideas of creating a society in which everyone does his best for the good of everyone is appealing and fundamentally a more uplifting idea than capitalism. Communism’s only real weakness seems to be that it doesn’t work.”
— 60 Minutes commentator Andy Rooney in The New York Times, June 26, 1989.

■ “Instead of reveling in the collapse of communism, we could head off economic and social havoc by admitting that for most of us, capitalism doesn’t work, either…Homeless, jobless, illiterate people, besieged by guns and drugs, are as bereft of a democratic lifestyle as anybody behind the old Berlin Wall…If we look within ourselves, we will see that a capitalistic order that is dependent upon cheap labor and an underclass to exploit is too dangerous a concept to continue.”
— USA Today Inquiry Editor Barbara Reynolds, December 8, 1989.

■ “This is Marlboro country, southeastern Poland, a place where the transition from communism to capitalism is making more people more miserable every day….No lines at the shops now, but plenty at some of the first unemployment centers in a part of the world where socialism used to guarantee everybody a job.”
— CBS News reporter Burt Quint on the April 11, 1990 CBS Evening News.

■ “East Germany is staggering toward unification, and may get there close to dead on arrival, the victim of an overdose of capitalism.”
— ABC reporter Jerry King, October 1, 1990 World News Tonight.

■ “Poles had hoped that the long wait had ended, but it has not. After four decades of standing in communism’s food lines, capitalism has created a new place to wait: at the unemployment office.”
— NBC reporter Mike Boettcher, November 16, 1990 Nightly News.

■ “Welcome to capitalism, the best little economic whorehouse on earth. The rich squeeze the rest of us until our screaming gets loud enough to make them step back from the trough for a couple of years. What is the deficit except 10 years of checks written by the rich on the bank accounts of everyone else?”
— Washington Post sports writer Tom Boswell in a March 22, 1992 Washington Post Magazine profile of the highly-paid Baltimore Orioles star Cal Ripken.

■ “Americans often castigate individual companies but rarely question the competitive, free-market culture that gives companies huge, sometimes dangerous, power….But hubris and the abuse of power are numbingly familiar phenomena.”
— Newsweek General Editor Jolie Solomon, September 27, 1993.

■ “I think that capitalism is inherently amoral and it is folly to expect that a system run on greed will be able to adopt some virtuous precepts to prevent the violations of human rights.”
— ABC News correspondent and former NPR reporter John Hockenberry, in an America Online auditorium, March 2, 1995.

■ “The Communist Manifesto is well worth the $12 that Verso is asking. Despite the hype, its message is a timeless one that bears repeating every century or so: The meek shall triumph and the mighty shall fall; the hungry and exhausted will get restless and someday — someday! — rise up against their oppressors. The prophet Isaiah said something like this, and so, a little more recently, did Jesus.”
— Time columnist Barbara Ehrenreich in an April 30, 1998 book review for the Web site Salon.

■ “Ten years later, many are saying the unbridled capitalism that followed communism has unleashed misery on citizens who had all their social needs taken care of, especially in the former Soviet Union.”
— CNN’s Christiane Amanpour talking about the fall of the Berlin Wall, The World Today, November 8, 1999.

■ “The downward spiral of the economy is challenging a notion that has underpinned American economic policy for a quarter-century — the idea that prosperity springs from markets left free of government interference.”
— New York Times economics reporter Peter Goodman in an April 13, 2008 “Week in Review” piece headlined: “The Free Market: A False Idol After All?”

■ “East Germany Had Its Charms, Crushed by Capitalism”
— Headline over an October 29, 2008 New York Times review of a book bemoaning the introduction of Western capitalism to the former Warsaw Pact country.

■ “If we fail to acknowledge the reality of the growing role of government in the economy, insisting instead on fighting 21st-century wars with 20th-century terms and tactics, then we are doomed to a fractious and unedifying debate….Whether we like it or not — or even whether many people have thought much about it or not — the numbers clearly suggest that we are headed in a more European direction.”
— Jon Meacham and Evan Thomas in Newsweek’s February 16, 2009 cover story, “We Are All Socialists Now.”

■ “I don’t think that left to its own devices, capitalism moves along smoothly and everyone gets treated fairly in the process. Capitalism is like a child: if you want the child to grow up free and productive, somebody’s got to look over the shoulder of that child.”
— PBS host Tavis Smiley in a Time magazine symposium on “The Future of Capitalism,” May 25, 2009 issue.

■ “Thanks to globalism’s discontents and the financial crisis that has spread across the planet, Karl Marx and his analysis of capitalism’s dark, wormy side are back in vogue.”
— New York Times book critic Dwight Garner in an August 19, 2009 review of a new biography of Friedrich Engels.

■ “How does it defame a person to call him a ‘socialist’ (outside of nutty far-right circles) — a set of ideas many advanced Western democracies find congenial, what with the accessible health-care, affordable higher education and good public transportation?”
— Randy Cohen, author of “The Ethicist” column in The New York Times Magazine, June 20, 2010.

■ “We know we live in a free-market capitalist society. And in this society, individuals, more today than ever, have been able to amass billions of dollars in personal wealth. Do we need to revisit capitalism, seeing that the disparity between the rich and the poor has become so exaggerated?”
— Host Stephanie Ruhle’s question to Melinda Gates on MSNBC Live with Stephanie Ruhle, April 24, 2019.

■ “I wonder if you think, fundamentally, capitalism needs to change and, if you do, what the Biden administration plans to push for on that front?”
— Host Poppy Harlow to White House economic advisor Jared Bernstein on CNN Newsroom, January 28, 2021.

■ “Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ slender volume appeared in 1848. For many of those betrayed by the so-called free market, in the years since, the pamphlet has offered refuge, inspiration and argument….Like Hamlet’s ghost, The Manifesto is both impossible and imperative in its call for action.”
— NPR’s On the Media host Brooke Gladstone talking about The Communist Manifesto, February 24, 2023.