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?

If so, our posture would be as follows: we published the story and said it was true, but now we are going to nominate it for a Pulitzer -- now that's serious business.

I don't believe you on the 'Jimmy' story. No, I don't, and I'm going to prove it if it's the last thing I do.

The reviewers of fifty years ago knew that their primary loyalty must lie not with their fellow poets or publishers but with the reader. Consequently they reported their reactions with scrupulous honesty even when their opinions might lose them literary allies and writing assignments. In discussing new poetry they addressed a wide community of educated readers. Without talking down to their audience, they cultivated a public idiom. Prizing clarity and accessibility they avoided specialist jargon and pedantic displays of scholarship. They also tried, as serious intellectuals should but specialists often do not, to relate what was happening in poetry to social, political, and artistic trends. They charged modern poetry with cultural importance and made it the focal point of their intellectual discourse.

This just might do nobody any good. At the end of this discourse a few people may accuse this reporter of fouling his own comfortable nest, and your organization may be accused of having given hospitality to heretical and even dangerous thoughts. But the elaborate structure of networks, advertising agencies and sponsors will not be shaken or altered. It is my desire, if not my duty, to try to talk to you journeymen with some candor about what is happening to radio and television.

What separated Murrow from the pack was courage.

Speak the truth and shame the Devil.

Interviewer: You describe seemingly fantastic events in such minute detail that it gives them their own reality. Is this something you have picked up from journalism? Garcia Marquez: That's a journalistic trick which you can also apply to literature. If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants in the sky, people will probably believe you.

These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one's eye on. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened. The raping and butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish roads - they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late.

The failure of a free press in most countries is usually blamed on the readers. Every nation gets the government--and the press--it deserves. This is too facile a remark. The people deserve better in most governments and press. Readers, in millions of cases, have no way of finding out whether their newspapers are fair or not, honest or distorted, truthful or colored....

One of the biggest pieces of bunkum shoved down the American throat was the story of the 1929 Italian election. For this I cannot blame my colleagues.

Forbidden to write anything critical of the Fascist regime, they could only report what the hierarchy wanted them to report. The clever and honest American and British journalists, however, did insinuate startling facts in their stories; these insinuations, unfortunately, were between the lines and not for those who read as they run, and the American public is mostly a running reading public.

Of course there are boob and bad reporters who bring in boob and bad items which are printed, and which make so many papers what they are. But there are more intelligent men who try to bring in intelligent items, only to see them changed into imbecile items, with the result that they may easily give up trying, and accustom themselves instead to the spirit of the office....

I am merely trying to illustrate one of the fundamental facts about American journalism today, the fact that the servants of the press lords are slaves very much as they have always been, and that any attempt at revolt is immediately punished with the economic weapon.

But much more vicious than these cases is the majority of foreign correspondents who never have to be placed against the wall, who are never told what to write and how to write it, but who know from contact with the great minds of the press lords or from the simple deduction that the bosses are in big business and the news must be slanted accordingly, or from the general intangible atmosphere which prevails everywhere, what they can do and what they must never do. The most stupid boast in the history of present-day journalism is that of the writer who says, 'I have never been given orders; I am free to do as I like.'

It was I who gave the title 'J'accuse' to Zola's letter.

Journalism largely consists in saying 'Lord Jones Dead' to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.

Cette bonhomie apparente qui seduit les nouveaux venus et n'empeche aucune trahison, qui se permet et justifie tout, qui jette les hauts cris a une blessure et la pardonne, est un des caracteres distinctifs du journaliste. Cette camaraderie, mot cree par un homme d'esprit, corrode les plus belles ames: elle rouille leur fierte, tue le principe des grandes ?uvres, et consacre la lachete de l'esprit.

This is Howard Cosell telling it like it is.

He become a giant by the simple act of telling the truth in an industry that was not used to hearing it and considered it revolutionary. Every person working in sports journalism today owes a tremendous debt to Howard Cosell. His greatest contribution was elevating sports reporting out of daily play-by-play and placing it in the larger context of society.

Anything that gets the adrenalin moving like a 440 volt blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the veins free of cholesterol... but too many adrenaline rushes in any given time span has the same effect on the nervous system as too many electro-shock treatments are said to have on the brain: after a while you start burning out the circuits. When a jackrabbit gets addicted to road-running, its only a matter of time before he gets smashed - and when a journalist turns into a politics junkie he will sooner or later start raving and babbling in print about things that only a person who has Been There can possibly understand.

Three journalists have died in Baghdad... American troops are killing journalists in a profoundly foreign country, under cover of a war being fought for savage, greed-crazed reasons that most of them couldn't explain or even understand.

I thought Jack Valenti was wrong about most of the tech-policy issues that he spoke about, but I'm going to miss that guy... One of the lingering regrets of my career is showing up a few minutes late to a Post boardroom luncheon with Valenti that had started with him denouncing a column I'd written about the MPAA's 'technological totalitarianism.' When I sat down, then-managing editor Steve Coll leaned over to summarize Valenti's opening statement as 'he took your name in vain'; I felt like I'd missed the whole show.

I do not know why journalists insist on calling their stuff 'pieces', when they are in fact little entities, attempting to have beginnings, middles and endings.

I had been sent to Mexico to cover a murder, one of a remarkable kind.

Texas is : 'trotting' journalism, history in a hurry.

People are always dying in the Times who don't seem to die in other papers, and they die at greater length and maybe even with a little more grace.

All that crap, you're putting it in the paper? It's all been denied. Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published. Good Christ! That's the most sickening thing I ever heard.

Here is what I believe is the paradigm that would be effective and what I would love to see, and you're going to laugh because Fox News is my model. What Fox has done is they've got a guy, Roger Ailes, who's passionate and has created a model for a 24-hour news station that makes money based on a point of view... Using Fox's model, find someone with the passion and the huevos to just lay it on the line - not in a partisan way, not in the pursuit of political power and political gain, but in the pursuit of credibility. In the pursuit of being a judge, an arbiter, and earning the trust of the audience over time as an oversight to the shenanigans of the political world.

A free and independent press is essential to the health of a functioning democracy. It serves to inform the voting public on matters relevant to its well-being. Why they've stopped doing that is a mystery. I mean, 300 camera crews outside a courthouse to see what Kobe Bryant is wearing when the judge sets his hearing date, while false information used to send our country to war goes unchecked? What the fuck happened?

I love watching the White House press conferences; they're very enjoyable. I love watching talented journalists who spent their entire lives to get the point where they're in the White House press corps, only to find out they're dictation machines where the White House will tell them what to say. But I'm watching it today and the strangest thing happened: today was the first press conference since they released the President's Vietnam service record and suddenly, it's like there's a whole new attitude. I have just one question for the press corps: Where the fuck have you been? You're starting to ask questions now? Now? All of a sudden, they've got questions and it's about his Vietnam service. Guys, you're like eight wars behind. Hey! I heard there was a break-in at the Watergate! You might want to check in on that!

Kesey practices what has come to be known as gonzo journalism. The reporter, often intoxicated, fails to get the story but delivers instead a stylishly bizarre account that mocks conventional journalism.

Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich's June 1, 1997 column, commonly referred to as 'Wear sunscreen', was widely attributed to a commencement address made by Kurt Vonnegut at M.I.T.

O.K., I'm a rock critic. I also write and record music. I write poetry, fiction, straight journalism, unstraight journalism, beatnik drivel, mortifying love letters, death threats to white jazz critics signed 'The Mau Maus of East Harlem,' and once a year my own obituary (latest entry: 'He was promising...').

Some journalists are just motivated by their own sense of what they want to say or what they feel comfortable saying or writing about. In '77, I was on the cover of Time. The same week I had a big story in Newsweek. In one of the magazines it says I live alone, and the other magazine said I live with Jane Wagner. Unless you were so really adamantly out, and had made some declaration at some press conference, people back then didn't write about your relationship.

Newspaper press is a great power, but just as an unchained torrent of water submerges whole country sides and devastates crops, even so an uncontrolled pen serves but to destroy.

Without doubt Margaret Fuller stood first among women of the nineteenth century. ... Though today almost forgotten, Margaret Fuller still probably holds more firsts than any other American woman who ever lived. As editor of the transcendentalist Dial, she was the first woman editor of an important intellectual magazine. She was the first woman to write a book about the West and such experiences as sleeping in a barroom, shooting rapids in an Indian canoe, and witnessing maltreatment of the red man by the white man. She was the first woman to break the taboo against the female sex in the Harvard College Library. As columnist for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, she was the first U.S. woman journalist and and the first professional literary critic of cither sex in the United States.

[The 'liberal media'] love to be denounced from the right, and the right loves to denounce them, because that makes them look like courageous defenders of freedom and independence while, in fact, they are imposing all of the presuppositions of the propaganda system.

Rush Limbaugh makes more serious points while clowning around than a whole page full of New York Times columnists make while being solemn and pompous.

We all cooperated, all of us, East and West, regardless of country, because the working conditions were really terrible.

We always moved in groups from one coup d'etat to another, from one war to another.

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.)