Quote #4

Someone [on the staff of The Times] had invented a game - a competition with a small prize for the winner - to see who could write the dullest headline. It had to be a genuine headline, that is to say one which was actually printed in the next morning's newspaper. I won it only once with a headline which announced: 'Small Earthquake in Chile. Not many dead.'

More from Claud Cockburn

  1. There is nothing quite so terrifying as a mad sheep.
  2. Since becoming a journalist I had often heard the advice to 'believe nothing until it has been officially denied'.
  3. A devout and serious Christian, she was often bothered by what she read of socialists because she could not, instantly and absolutely, see …
  4. A newspaper is always a weapon in somebody's hands.
  5. He had been upset by my observation that a wartime Minister of Information was compelled, in the national interest, to such continuous acts…
  6. The hired journalist, I thought, ought to realize that he is partly in the entertainment business and partly in the advertising business - …
  7. Evidently there are plenty of people in journalism who have neither got what they liked nor quite grown to like what they get. They write p…
  8. If I wrote a book about England I should call it What About Wednesday Week? which is what English people say when they are making what they…

All Claud Cockburn quotes