185 Journalism Quotes

Media people should have long noses like an elephant to smell out politicians, mayors, prime ministers and businessmen. We need to know the reality, the good and the bad, not just the appearance.

Going to where the silence is. That is the responsibility of a journalist: giving a voice to those who have been forgotten, forsaken, and beaten down by the powerful.

Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

It would be absurd for me or any other editor to review the authenticity or accuracy of stories that are nominated for prizes.

The reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today and they, or rather we [journalists], too often are squandering our power and ignoring our obligations. The consequence of our abdication of responsibility is the ugly spectacle of idiot culture!

The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing. We now have a mainstream press whose news agenda is increasingly influenced by this netherworld.

The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don't know - Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel - the quality of philosophy.

If radio news is to be regarded as a commodity, only acceptable when saleable, then I don't care what you call it - I say it isn't news.

A reporter is always concerned with tomorrow. There's nothing tangible of yesterday. All I can say I've done is agitate the air ten or fifteen minutes and then boom - it's gone.

Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.

In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.

The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.

If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they're attached to dollar signs - unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times.

The fault I find with most American newspapers is not the absence of dissent. it is the absence of news. With a dozen or so honorable exceptions, most American newspapers carry very little news. Their main concern is advertising.

Europe has a press that stresses opinions; America a press, radio, and television that emphasize news.

We've uncovered some embarrassing ancestors in the not-too-distant past. Some horse thieves, and some people killed on Saturday nights. One of my relatives, unfortunately, was even in the newspaper business.

One of the objects of a newspaper is to understand popular feeling and to give expression to it; another is to arouse among the people certain desirable sentiments; and the third is fearlessly to expose popular defects.

I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.

As a journalist, my job is to be dispassionate. Suddenly to be the centre of a story and to be crying, it made me feel very insecure.

My sense is that, when you look at what people such as former Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have said over the years, you don't go with a story unless you have two independent sources to confirm it.

The UN stopped using Chalabi's information as a basis for conducting inspections once the tenuous nature of his sources and his dubious motivations became clear. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the mainstream US media, which give prominent coverage to sources of information that, had they not been related to Hussein's Iraq, would normally be immediately dismissed.

A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.

Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.

I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.

Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience.

But for the media to name their coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq the same as what the Pentagon calls it-everyday seeing 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'-you have to ask: 'If this were state controlled media, how would it be any different?'

If you think that the intifada in France is about housing, go and try covering the story wearing a yarmulka.

So what do they do? They start writing articles in the New York Daily News. Boy, that's a paper that loves to write crap on people, isn't it? Wanna talk about a paper that supports fascism! Man, I've seen more doctors hatcheted in there. The butchery they did on Emmanuel Revici, the butchery they did on Lawrence Burton, calling him nothing more --- what was the quote the guy said?. . . 'Burton is nothing more than a horse doctor.' Denigrating him, tearing down his character.

The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.

I sought in political reporting what Galsworthy in another context had called 'the significant trifle'- the bit of dialogue, the overlooked fact, the buried observation which illuminated the realities of the situation.

The rising power of the United States in world affairs ... requires, not a more compliant press, but a relentless barrage of facts and criticism.... Our job in this age, as I see it, is not to serve as cheerleaders for our side in the present world struggle but to help the largest possible number of people to see the realities of the changing and convulsive world in which American policy must operate.

Everybody wrings their hands about Fox News. You know, 'fair and balanced? Why, that's snide!' Yeah, okay, maybe they're not fair and balanced, but CNN used to have the slogan 'You Can Depend on CNN'. Guess what? I watch it, no you can't. So what's the difference?

The experience was an exciting one for me. It illustrated that writing was about risk-about risking everything. And that the value of the writing is not in what you publish but in its consequences. If you set out to describe reality, then the influence of the writing is upon reality. (A 1989 interview with Granta magazine founder Bill Buford. Reprinted in Adbusters Magazine #71.)

Simon Amstell: So Penny, you used to do a fashion column for the Daily Mail, didn't you? Penny Smith: Yes I've done many strange things in my time. Simon Amstell: So what does one wear to a lynching?

This series is more campaigning. It is more journalistic, but still hugely entertaining. It's a show we feel more proud of than anything we've done to date.

Tzara: Causality is no longer fashionable owing to the war. Carr: How illogical, since the war itself had causes. I forget what they were, but it was all in the papers at the time. Something about brave little Belgium, wasn't it? Tzara: Was it? I thought it was Serbia... Carr: Brave little Serbia...? No, I don't think so. The newspapers would never have risked calling the British public to arms without a proper regard for succinct alliteration.

Wagner: There were printers getting more than journalists! Milne: Yes, I know, but you make it sound as if the natural order has been overthrown. Fish sing in the streets, rivers run uphill, and the printers are getting more than the journalists. Okay - you're worth more than a printer. But look at some of this - 'We find the vanishing vicar of Lovers' Leap!' 'Sally Smith is a tea lady in a Blackpool engineering works, but it was the way she filled those C-cups which got our cameraman all stirred up!' It's crap. And it's written by grown men earning maybe ten thousand a year. If I was a printer, I'd look at some of the stuff I'm given to print, and I'd ask myself what is supposed to be so special about the people who write it - is that radical enough for you - Dick?

David Colman in 'Possessed; A Ring as Blunt as Her Advice' in The New York Times (6 July 2003)

STEWART: No, this [CrossFire], it's theater. Like, take this for example. How old are you?

His interviewing self is, or was, an extra person, like the Holy Ghost, generated by self-contemplation.

What is the use of reading the common news of the day, the tragic deaths and abuses of daily living, when for over half a lifetime we have known that they must have occurred just as they have occurred given the conditions that cause them? There is no light in it. It is trivial fill-gap. We know the plane will crash, the train be derailed. And we know why. No one cares, no one can care. We get the news and discount it, we are quite right in doing so. It is trivial. But the haunted news I get from some obscure patient's eyes is not trivial. It is profound.

One has no notion of him as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist; his style stuns his readers:He is too much for any single newspaper antagonist; 'lays waste' a city orator or Member of Parliament, and bears hard upon the Government itself. He is a kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country. He is not only unquestionably the most powerful political writer of the present day, but one of the best writers in the language. He speaks and thinks plain, broad, downright English.

If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America.

Preparing a really slanted piece for its thousands of newspaper, radio, and Internet clients about the McCain-Obama race and foreign policy, Barry Schweid wrote, 'Obama by contrast is decades younger and inexperienced in foreign affairs. His political success until now is powered to a large extent by his youthful optimism for change. While that may ignite enthusiasm, it can also inspire allegations of naivete.' [25] The article then quotes Secretary of State Rice, of all people, criticizing Obama's willingness to engage Iran, leaving out other viewpoints, like from that appeaser who says Obama's right and we need to engage Iran, Robert Gates, President Bush's Secretary of Defense. [26] Nothing in media is utterly objective, but its clients keep the Associated Press in business in order to have one entity trying to cut it straight down the middle. When the AP starts taking sides, and starts reading like the Washington Times, or The Nation, we're all in a lot of trouble.

Rushdie had written a book of nonfiction which offered critical but decided support to the Nicaraguan revolution. He had also been eloquent about the rights of the ever-relegated Palestinians. What more natural, when he was threatened with assassination by contract, than to jubilate about a terrorist-symp who had been caught in his own logic? I counted some ten newspaper and magazine columns from the Podhoretz school, all making this same point in the same words - demonstrating the impressive Zhdanovite discipline that is the special mark of the faction. All of them seemed to regard the affair as some sort of heavenly revenge for the sin of radical promiscuity; much as they have represented the AIDS crisis as a vengeance as on sixties morality. The ethical nullity of these positions never got beyond mere gloating, and will one day help to illustrate the essential distinction between irony and brutish sarcasm.

For example, take Streicher, he is often classified with me because he was a journalist and propagandist. I always thought him very dumb and a sexual pervert. Therefore, I denounced Der Sturmer in public, although never on the radio, but frequently before classes of 200 to 250 journalists in the political propaganda courses which I gave at the university. I can state this quite frankly. In my defense, I want to touch the story of my relationship to Streicher with only a single sentence. On two occasions I attempted to prohibit Der Sturmer because of pornography. Regarding the protocols of the Elders of Zion, I thought that to be a stupid invention. Those are the only things that I will bring out in my defense in that regard. I think that in former years Streicher was a very cruel man, because I had several experiences with journalists who had been whipped by Streicher here in Nuremberg. They had been placed in concentration camps and I was able to liberate them only through the help of Hess at that time. I also believe that there was more than a little truth to the charges of embezzlement which were rumored at that time. Today I think a trifle better of him. I think he is mainly stupid. The crime does not lie in him but in the man who gave him power - the Fuhrer. I think that Streicher's mind is slow but that he has a certain natural strength which causes him to be a fanatic. This type of dumb individual can often be used for fanatical purposes.

I will pass over my flirtation with journalism as a way of making a living, an idea I dropped when I discovered that in the fifties - unlike now - female journalists always ended up writing the obituaries and the ladies' page. But how was I to make a living? There was not a roaring market in poetry, there, then. I thought of running away and being a waitress, which I later tried, but got very tired and thin; there's nothing like clearing away other people's mushed-up dinners to make you lose your appetite

Just because you read it in a magazine Or see it on the TV screen Don't make it factual ~ Tabloid Junkie

'The camera's eye on choice disguised

Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it.

If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. (Sometimes quoted as newspapers.)

The Sunday Star article, unidentified issue

I will find Katie Couric and I will commit the act of rape on her. And then when I'm done with her, I'll get on that news women they got on the air and, who the other one? Oh yeah, Greta Van Susteren, I will rape her.

Media people should have long noses like an elephant to smell out politicians, mayors, prime ministers and businessmen. We need to know the reality, the good and the bad, not just the appearance.

The Colbert Report

'There seems to be a lot of love-hate relationships in Fiji today, between so many and the media, simply because there are so many negative reporting and a serious lack of understanding on journalists' part on working on reports or their stories. I am actually hoping for more from the Fiji media and the region, we need a whole lot more positive reporting.'

'I ask the media to concentrate on positive things rather than just doing the rounds on rape, incest, molestation on women.'

An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.

Accuracy to a newspaper is what virtue is to a lady; but a newspaper can always print a retraction.

I am far from denying that newspapers in democratic countries lead citizens to do very ill-considered things in common; but without newspapers there would be hardly any common action at all. So they mend many more ills than they cause.

'En voi paljastaa lahdettani.' ('I can't reveal my informant.')

Defending the weeklies, as well as Connell and his collaborators, is the unflagging media critic and campaigner for human rights Debito Arudou, who wrote that WaiWai was an essential guide to Japanese attitudes and editorial directives.

Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the identity of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.

She was a spokesman on all sorts of issues: freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the adoptability of disadvantaged children, the future of China, especially the battle for women's rights, for education. If you followed in her trail, as I did, you were put in touch with almost every major movement in the United States - intellectual, social, and political.

There are a lot of people who think our job is to reassure the public every night that their home, their community and their nation is safe. I don't subscribe to that at all. I subscribe to leaving people with essentially - sorry it's a cliche - a rough draft of history. Some days it's reassuring, some days it's absolutely destructive.

'I'm a little concerned about this notion everybody wants us to be objective,' Jennings said. Jennings said that everyone - even journalists - have points of view through which they filter their perception of the news. It could be race, sex or income. But, he said, reporters are ideally trained to be as objective as possible. 'And when we don't think we can be fully objective, to be fair.'

I have never spent a day in my adult life where I didn't learn something, and if there is a born-again quality to me, that's it.

I don't think anybody who looks carefully at us thinks that we are a left-wing or a right-wing organization.

We have been criticized, a little bit to my surprise, by people who think I was not enough pro-war. That is simply not the way I think of this role. This role is designed to question the behavior of government officials on behalf of the public. I think people who have done this and all jobs in journalism have believed that.

Are we out of step with the administration because we do not comport completely to their political point of view?... So they criticize us for it. It goes with the territory, and if we get a groundswell we begin to look at ourselves.

I don't think the public realizes how much soul-searching goes on in news organizations about what is the right thing to do.

On 9/11, those of us who do the jobs that I do, flew without a net for hour and hour and hour after end. And then you hope and pray that you've had the experience to be up to it. Because then you're editor, analyst, reporter, correspondent, ringmaster, the whole thing.

I think no matter what we cover, people tend to see what we cover through their own particular political or personal prisms. I always ask people to be specific what they're talking about. You can't cover the Middle East - you can't cover American politics - you can't cover America these days without finding people in one place or another taking exception to what we do. I think it goes with the territory. Keeps me, at least I hope, mindful, always that there's at least one other opinion and sometimes a dozen other opinions. And they all bear accounting for. But not everybody is right you know because somebody says, 'well you did X', and you say 'well, maybe X is right in some cases'.

My dad was part of the pioneers of public broadcasting in Canada. And he always told me the most important thing you can be in your career is fair. So we all start to see a box and hope that we see the box in the same way. But you recognize in time that people see the box or they see traffic accidents in entirely different ways. So you train yourself over the years to try and give accounting to the variety... and come to some decent place in the middle. But I'm not a slave to objectivity. I'm never quite sure what it means. And it means different things to different people.

I've always been very zealous about not invading other people's private spaces.

I'm fascinated by everything. There's just too much going on in too many places that I just daren't miss.

Full text at Time Magazine Website - 'The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power', Richard Behar, Time Magazine (May 6, 1991)

ProjectKlebnikov.org - 'The global media alliance investigating the July 9th, 2004 murder of Paul Klebnikov, the editor-in-chief of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine'

Of all the people insistently expressing their mental vacuity, none has a better excuse for an empty head than the newspaperman: If he pauses to restock his brain, he invites onrushing headlines to trample him flat.

I don't make art, I make spoken and sung journalism.

The fear of missing out means today's media, more than ever before, hunts in a pack. In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits. But no-one dares miss out.

Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters.

The methods by which the 'Empire of Business' maintains its control over journalism are four: First, ownership of the papers; second, ownership of the owners; third, advertising subsidies; and fourth, direct bribery. By these methods there exists in America a control of news and of current comment more absolute than any monopoly in any other industry.

I did not want to say these unpleasant things, but you have written to me, asking my opinion, and I give it to you, flat. If you would get over two ideas - first that any one who criticizes you is an evil and capitalist-controlled spy, and second that you have only to spend a few weeks on any subject to become a master of it - you might yet regain your now totally lost position as the leader of American socialistic journalism.

Are you asking me while I am under complete siege? You are a wonderful journalist. You have to respect your profession. You have to be accurate when you are speaking with General Yasser Arafat. Be quiet! You are covering, with such questions, the terrorist activities of the Israeli occupation and the Israeli crimes. Be fair! Why do you make these certain mistakes? Thank you. Bye, bye!

Blog on Vernon Corea 1927-2002

You gotta see English crime. It's hilarious, you don't know if you're reading the front page or the comic section over there. I swear to God. I read an article front page of the paper one day, in England, 'Yesterday, some Hooligans knocked over a dustbin in Shaftesbury.' ...Wooooo. 'The hooligans are loose! The hooligans are loose! ...What if they become ruffians? I would hate to be a dustbin in Shaftesbury tonight. (to the tune of 'Behind Blue Eyes' by The Who) No one knows what it's like... to be a dustbin... in Shaftesbury... with hooligans...'

He seems to me like the last, best example of a tradition that had already started to vanish long before his death - the tradition of Martha Gellhorn and Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite, people who went and found out what was really happening before they started to talk about it. ~ John Simpson, BBC world affairs editor