Quotes About Journalism

If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.

No mischlinge in journalism, the creative arts, the performing arts, literature . . . Culture is verboten.

He could tell from the faces of some of the reporters that it was going to be one of those mornings

We glean what is public primarily, but not exclusively, from media.

Writers—journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights—can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace; and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to.

The irrelevance cum sensationalism of mainstream media, its strange quietude on vital issues, its publicity posing as journalism did their job and mangled my own hapless, helpless unspeakable thoughts.

When asked about his photographic techniques, Arthur "Weegee" Fellig, a photojournalist from the 30s and 40s, answered, "f/8 and be there.

Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence.

I admired Eugene McCarthy's courage and although I left his Senate staff after four years to accept a job as the researcher on the editorial page of the 'Washington Post ' I remained an admirer.

Had I made the right decision to give up law school—the "safe" choice—to pursue my passion—a career in broadcast journalism? Would I be stuck making $ 15,000 a year for the rest of my career? Would my father, who had landed on these shores as an Italian immigrant with $ 20 in his pocket after World War II, have been proud of my decision, or would the former prisoner of war have felt that his son was squandering an opportunity to make it in America?

A distinguished journalist advised me to be so clear in my thinking that I could hold the story of what happened in a single sentence. It is this: I came upon something evil and destroyed it.

The nicest thing is to open the newspapers and not to find yourself in them.

The freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.

journalists fea their loss of authority in the digital age will undermine their ability to hold government to account. Yet the government has much more to worry about because the internet has empowered vested interests, and Oppositions, in a way that effectively cancel an election result within weeks of the final ballot being counted. p236

The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration but the honing is uniform.

I knew I was going to be a journalist when I was eight years old and I saw the printing presses rolling at the Sydney newspaper where my dad worked as a proofreader.

Journalism has already come to be the first power in the land.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.

Newspapers have developed what might be called a vested interest in catastrophe. If they can spot a fight, they play up that fight. If they can uncover a tragedy, they will headline that tragedy.

Burke said there were three Estates in Parliament; but in the reporters' gallery yonder, there sat a fourth Estate more important than them all.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once; a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow.

An editor - a person employed on a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.