145 News Quotes

We live in the midst of alarms; anxiety beclouds the future; we expect some new disaster with each newspaper we read.

It's well-known that men and women are different but it keeps being re-discovered with great excitement.

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.

I am frightened by the imbalance, the constant striving to reach the largest possible audience for everything; by the absence of a sustained study of the state of the nation.

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.

News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.

You'd learn more about the world by lying on the couch and drinking gin out of a bottle than by watching the news.

The news of the discovery spread fast all over the country, and inquisitive enquiries mingled with congratulations from this moment became the daily programme.

Why are we seeing George Bush on TV every two hours for nine or ten days at a time, like some kind of mutated Mr. Rogers clone? Something is dangerously wrong in any country where a monumentally-failed backwoods politician can scare our national TV networks so totally that they will give him anything he wants.

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.

Experience has taught me that those who give their time to the absorbing claims of what is called society, not having leisure to keep up a large acquaintance with the organs of opinion, remain much more ignorant of the general state either of the public mind, or of the active and instructed part of it, than a recluse who reads the newspapers need be.

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.

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.

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.

'Terrorists don't take black hostages. Thats the truth. I have yet to see one of us on the news reading a hostage letter. Like, 'Uh...they is treatin us good. Uh we are chillin and shit. I'd like to give a shout out to Ray-Ray an Big Steve and uh, send some Newports!' '

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent.

The maddest phenomenon in this wholly mad world - that the filming or wirelessing of an event, whether it is the Grand National or an attack in force on the Maginot Line, is held to be of more importance than the event itself.

My life [is] a series of Hollywood orgies and Kabbalah center brunches with the cast of Friends. At least that's what my handlers tell me. I'm actually too valuable to live my own life and spend most of my days in a vegetable crisper to remain fake news anchor fresh.

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?

People read the papers not in the hopes of learning something new, but in the expectation of being told what they already know. This is a form of living death. Its apotheosis is the daily poll in USA Today, which informs 'us' what percentage of a small number of unscientifically selected people called a toll number to vote on questions that cannot possibly be responded to with a 'yes' or 'no.'

Bah, the latest news, the latest news is not the last.

Newspapermen learn to call a murderer 'an alleged murderer' and the King of England 'the alleged King of England' to avoid libel suits.

It is better to be making the news than taking it; to be an actor rather than a critic.

The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context. The pressure to compete, the fear somebody else will make the splash first, creates a frenzied environment in which a blizzard of information is presented and serious questions may not be raised.

The lowest form of popular culture-lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives-has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.

One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles. The top management of the networks with a few notable exceptions, has been trained in advertising, research, sales or show business. But by the nature of the coporate structure, they also make the final and crucial decisions having to do with news and public affairs. Frequently they have neither the time nor the competence to do this.

The newspapers print what the people want, and thus does the savage still swing his club and flourish his spear. [Pg. 142.]

Only in democratic countries is there the beginning of a suspicion that the old axioms about the press being the bulwark of liberty is something that affects the daily life of the people--that it is a living warning rather than an ancient wisecrack. A people that wants to be free must arm itself with a free press.

So much for Objective Journalism. Don't bother to look for it here - not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

The newspapers! Sir, they are the most villainous - licentious - abominable - infernal - Not that I ever read them-no-I make it a rule never to look into a newspaper.

I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument. I call it the 'No Fact Zone'. Fox News, I hold a copyright on that term.

Now wash out your ears with this.

I get all the news I need from the weather report.

I mean you look in the paper and you see the bodies of mutilated people, and that's sexy. Controversy isn't saying something like 'Oh I've fucked Noel Gallagher' or something. Which I have.

Thanks for the newsflash, Chels.

[Television is] a really dreadful influence on all of us. Don't ever look at local television news again. It's all crap. There's no news, there's no information. It's negative, negative, negative. You look at that, and you think the world is coming to an end.

'Great news! bloody news!' cried a newsman; The Devil said, 'Stop, let me see!' 'Great news? bloody news?' thought the Devil; 'The bloodier the better for me.'

Ladies and gentlemen, if you're going to Georgia, Jane Fonda and Ted Turner broke up. Yes they did. Jane found God and Ted found out it wasn't him.

Our media make crisis chatter out of news and fill our minds with anxious phantoms of the real thing - a summit in Helsinki, a treaty in Egypt, a constitutional crisis in India, a vote in the U.N., the financial collapse of New York. We can't avoid being politicized (a word as murky as the condition which it describes) because it is necessary after all to know what is going on. Worse yet, what is going on will not let us alone. Neither the facts nor the deformations, the insidious platitudes of the media (tormenting because the underlying realities are so large and so terrible), can be screened out. The study of literature itself is heavily 'politicized.'

Special Correspondence. I learn from a very high authority, whose name I am not at liberty to mention, (speaking to me at a place which I am not allowed to indicate and in a language which I am forbidden to use)--that Austria-Hungary is about to take a diplomatic step of the highest importance. What this step is, I am forbidden to say. But the consequences of it--which unfortunately I am pledged not to disclose--will be such as to effect results which I am not free to enumerate.

Il faut toujours en fait de nouvelles attendre le sacrement de la confirmation.

A fancifully fancyless medium of unvarnished news.

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.

'Mrs. Sandoval,' Homer said swiftly, 'your son is dead. Maybe it's a mistake. Maybe it wasn't your son. Maybe it was somebody else. The telegram says it was Juan Domingo. But maybe the telegram is wrong.'

'See through the news and the views that twist reality'

NASA article on lightning's effects on humans

A Haiku by GW Bush from his trip to Japan, November 16th, 2005 (pointed out by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show)[103]:

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

Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. 'Wouldn't you say,' she asked, 'that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?' No, I said, I wouldn't say that. 'But what about Basketball Diaries?' she asked. 'Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?' The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it. The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. 'Events like this,' I said, 'if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory.' In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of 'explaining' them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.

Just what not why...

In USA Today ... today.

Most of us here in the media are what I call infotainers...Rush Limbaugh is what I call a disinfotainer. He entertains by spreading disinformation.

And now ... Page Three

Malvern Gaz article

You will find that the truth is often unpopular and the contest between agreeable fancy and disagreeable fact is unequal. For, in the vernacular, we Americans are suckers for good news.

O'er the wires the electric message came, 'He is no better; he is much the same.'

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

News is that which comes from the North, East, West and South, and if it comes from only one point on the compass, then it is a class publication and not news.

U.S. News & World Report (20 August 2001)

I heard somebody say that the war ended today, but everybody knows it's going still.

[On being told of Calvin Coolidge's death] How do they know?

We may well be ashamed to tell what things we have read or heard in our day. I do not know why my news should be so trivial, - considering what one's dreams and expectations are, why the developments should be so paltry. The news we hear, for the most part, is not news to our genius. It is the stalest repetition.

I had been gone a fortnight when the telegram was put into my hands. I had got a letter from my sister, a few hours before, saying that all was well at home. The telegram said in five words that she had died suddenly the previous night. There was no mention of my mother, and I was three days' journey from home. The news I got on reaching London was this: my mother did not understand that her daughter was dead, and they were waiting for me to tell her.

I will not say that your mulberry-trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive.

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.

The only gossip I'm interested in is in the Weekly World News- 'Woman's bra bursts, 11 injured.' That kind of thing.

Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.

Never awake me when you have good news to announce, because with good news nothing presses; but when you have bad news, arouse me immediately, for then there is not an instant to be lost.

Where village statesmen talked with looks profound, And news much older than their ale went round.

We have met the enemy and they are ours- two ships, two brigs, one schooner and one sloop.

Good evening. We begin tonight...

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.

There's a whole industry of conservatives saying, 'Ah, it's those damn liberals,' and a whole group of liberals saying, 'It's all those damn conservatives'... If you tailor your news viewing, as some people are now doing, so that you only get one point of view, well of course you're going to think somebody else has got a different point of view, and it may be wrong.

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.

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 was so focused on all of that, that it took me many hours, until my kids called, ironically. My kids both called and just left a little message that they were OK. And I turned around and went - Oh, man that really hit me like a ton of bricks - But most of the time we were spared that agony for the time being.

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'.

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

I usually read the obituaries first as there is always the happy chance that one of them will make my day.

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.

When his story of Pamela first came out, some extracts got into the public papers, and used by that means to find their way down as far as Preston in Lancashire, where my aunt who told me the story then resided. One morning as she rose, the bells were set singing and the flag was observed to fly from the great steeple. She rang her bell and inquired the reason of these rejoicings, when her maid came in bursting with joy, and said, 'Why, madam, poor Pamela's married at last; the news came down to us in this morning's paper.'

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.

When Mr. John P. Gavit, managing editor of the New York Evening Post, wrote to Mr. Melville E. Stone, general manager of the Associated Press, that I had a reputation 'as an insatiable hunter of personal publicity,' what Mr. Gavit meant was that I was accustomed to demand and obtain more space in newspapers than the amount of my worldly possessions entitled me to.

I also bought a copy of The New York Times, the previous day's issue of which I had seen the previous day in Puerto Rico. I was interested in newspapers and knew this paper to be one of the foremost in the world. But to read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them; the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself. It made me feel a stranger, that paper.

Larry King: Let's get to the part that may not have been enjoyable. What can - what happened? You tell me. What happened with the submarine? Vladimir Putin: [through interpreter] It sank.

Page Two ...

Page Four ...

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...'

I don't understand anything, so there you go : you know what my problem is? I watch too much news, man. That's my problem, that's why I'm so depressed all the time. I figured it out. I watch too much CNN, man. I don't know if you've ever sat around and watched CNN more than, I don't know, 20 hours in one day : I don't recommend that. Watch CNN Headline News for 1 hour, it's the most depressing thing you'll ever fucking do. 'WAR, FAMINE, DEATH, AIDS, HOMELESS, RECESSION, DEPRESSION. WAR, FAMINE, DEATH, AIDS, HOMELESS :' Then, you look out your window : [makes cricket noises] Where's all this shit happening? Ted Turner's making this shit up! Jane Fonda won't sleep with him, he runs to a typewriter: ''By 1992, we will all die of AIDS.' Read that on the air. I don't get laid, no one gets laid!' I'm writing Jane Fonda: 'Will you fuck this guy so we can get some good news, please?' I want to see a well-laid Ted Turner newscast: 'Hey, it's all going to work out. Here's sports.'

... a fairly common pattern in television news: right at the end a smile comes onto the face of the newsreader and this is the scientific joke - 'some scientist has proved that such and such is the case.' ... And it's clearly the bit of fun at the end, it's not serious at all. I want science to be taken seriously, because, after all, it's less ephemeral - it has a more eternal aspect than whatever the politics of the day might be, which, of course, gets the lead in the news.