Quotes About Journalism

Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

The best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism.

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.

The only thing I ever saw that came close to Objective Journalism was a closed-circuit TV setup that watched shoplifters in the General Store at Woody Creek, Colorado.

They would owe most of their success to a curious rape mania that rides on the shoulder of American journalism like some jeering, masturbating raven. Nothing grabs an editor's eye like a good rape.

That gin-soaked little Nazi from the Gazette got pissed off when you didn't doff your hat for the national anthem," Burgin explained. "He kept bitching about you to the guy in charge of the press box, then he got that asshole who works for him all cranked up and they started talking about having you arrested." "Jesus creeping shit," I muttered. "Now I know why I got out of sportswriting.

Journalism, to me, is just another drug – a free ride to scenes I'd probably miss if I stayed straight. But I'm neither a chemist nor an editor; all I do is take the pill or the assignment and see what happens. Now and then I get a bad trip, but experience has made me more careful about what I buy... so if you have a good pill I'm open; I'll try almost anything that hasn't bitten me in the past.

That's where Time magazine lives … way out there on the puzzled, masturbating edge, peering through the keyhole and selling what they see to the big wide world of Chamber of Commerce voyeurs who support the public prints.

He often swore that if all the people who had worked for the paper in those years could appear at one time before the throne of The Almighty—if they all stood there and recited their histories and their quirks and their crimes and their deviations—there was no doubt in his mind that God himself would fall down in a swoon and tear his hair. Of course Lotterman exaggerated;

Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. 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.

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.

I was tempted to start babbling crazily about Walter Cronkite: that he was heavy into the white slavery trade—sending agents to South Vietnam to adopt orphan girls, then shipping them back to his farm in Quebec to be lobotomized and sold into brothels up and down the Eastern seaboard….

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 contradiction in terms.

So I know what I'm talking about when I say most "journalists" are lying shitheads. I never knew a reporter who could even say the word "corrupt" without pissing in his pants from pure guilt.

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

A group photo of the top ten journalists in America on any given day would be a monument to human ugliness.

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 gross contradiction in terms.

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." ? Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Stick to journalism, Mr Cort, where you never have to understand anything.

Follow your fate, and be satisfied with it, and be glad not to be a second-hand motor salesman, or a yellow-press journalist, pickled in gin and nicotine, or a cripple - or dead.

Don't look for footnotes; there aren't any. No bibliography either. You want to fact check it, be my guest. If I found anything that confirmed my point of view, I included it. And if I discovered articles that contradicted my take on things, I simply followed the time-honored journalistic tradition of Fox News: I distorted them out of all proportion, or completely ignored them.

In some respect Journalism is like science, the best ideas were one that survived and strengthened by opposition.

As between an ethical professional requirement that a journalist hold nothing back and a patriotic duty not to shoot one's own soldiers in the back, we have found no difficulty in making a choice. Freedom of the press does not carry with it a general license to reveal our secret strengths and weaknesses to the enemy.

Serán necesarios largos años, escribe Václav Havel, antes de que los valores que se apoyan en la verdad y la autenticidad morales se impongan y se lleven por delante al cinismo político; pero, al final, siempre acaban venciendo. Ésta debe ser también la paciente apuesta del verdadero periodismo.