Quotes About Journalism

I keep telling myself to calm down, to take less of an interest in things and not to get so excited, but I still care a lot about liberty, freedom of speech and expression, and fairness in journalism.

I trust it will not be giving away professional secrets to say that many readers would be surprised, perhaps shocked, at the questions which some newspaper editors will put to a defenseless woman under the guise of flattery.

Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

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

A good newspaper is never quite good enough but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever.

I read Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Reader's Digest... I read some responsible journalism, and from that, I form my own opinions. I also happen to be intelligent, and I question everything.

Though the daily paper contains much that is swill, it also contains some good writing. From it you can learn to write leanly, you can learn to get to the point, and you can learn to compress several facts into a single clear sentence.

I recalled the old saw about why reporters always whistle when they are on the toilet; it's the only way they can remember which end to wipe.

Journalists are accused of being lapdogs when they don't ask the hard questions, but then accused of being rude when they do. Good thing we have tough hides.

The media bring our wars home, but only rarely have they been able to do it in complete freedom.

Someday the Sun will explode, and what about our journalism and poetry then? Well, so what? To hell with our exploding Sun. We have to do what we can do in the time we can act.

It is important to remember that, as Ken Auletta wrote in his definitive Greed and Glory on Wall Street, "no reporter can with 100 percent accuracy re-create events that occurred some time before. Memories play tricks on participants, the more so when the outcome has become clear. A reporter tries to guard against inaccuracies by checking with a variety of sources, but it is useful for a reader—and an author—to be humbled by this journalistic limitation.

I always warn aspiring reporters to observe three basic rules: 1. Never trust an editor. 2. Never trust an editor. 3. Never trust an editor.

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It was the most catastrophic media failure in a generation.

Spicer felt the media were no longer being held accountable for their mistakes.

A common refrain among Trump's antagonists in the press is that they must resist normalizing his presidency. But in the process, they have abnormalized journalism.

It was an example of a common phenomenon in American journalism (perhaps in social criticism in general), the shallow focusing on agents or on individuals, thus concealing what a deeper analysis would reveal—the failure of the government itself, indeed, of the political system.

The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.

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 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.

Journalism is a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world of misfits and drunkards and failures.

Hunter S. Thompson