Quotes About Journalism

When that raffish assortment arrived at the New York airport, a reporter discovered that one of the shipping cartons was clearly imprinted with the words Petal Soft Toilet Tissue, and he proceeded to publish my guilty secret. It's obvious now, I think, that I've always traveled in the grand manner.

I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.

I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst.

When the New York Times scratches its head, get ready for total baldness as you tear out your hair.

Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. All the News That's Fit to Print, it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there.

Yet the point that JFK missed—and that almost everyone else has gone on to miss—is that much of this journalism was devoted to upholding and defending the ideas not of the coming Russian and Chinese or (as Kennedy failed to appreciate at the time) Cuban Revolutions, but of the earlier American one.

A daily newspaper is destined to become like a weekly magazine. We'll be talking about what might happen tomorrow, with feature articles, investigative supplements, unexpected predictions...

The book has to give the idea of another kind of newspaper, has to show how I labored away for a year to create a model of journalism independent of all pressure, implying that the venture failed because it was impossible to have a free voice

The point is that newspapers are not there for spreading news but for covering it up. X happens, you have to report it, but it causes embarrassment for too many people, so in the same edition you add some shock headlines - mother kills four children, savings at risk of going up in smoke, letter from Garibaldi insulting his lieutenant Nino Bixio discovered, etc. - so news drowns in a great sea of information.

Ce ne sont pas les informations qui font le journal, mais le journal qui fait l'information. Et savoir rassembler quatre nouvelles différentes signifie en proposer au lecteur une cinquième.

No son las noticias las que hacen el periódico sino el periódico el que hace las noticias.

Ne naujienos kuria laikrašt?, o laikraštis kuria naujienas.

El caso es que los periódicos no están hechos para difundir sino para encubrir noticias. Sucede el hecho X, no puedes obviarlo, pero, como pone en apuros a demasiada gente, en ese mismo número te marcas unos titulones que le ponen a uno los pelos de punta: madre degüella a sus cuatro hijos, quizá nuestros ahorros acaben en cenizas

El libro tendrá que dar la idea de otro periódico, mostrar cómo yo durante todo un año me he empleado a fondo para realizar un modelo de periodismo independiente de toda presión, dejando entender que la aventura acabó mal porque no se podía alumbrar una voz libre.

Newspapermen are human, and cannot be blamed by their owners if now and then they yield to the temptation to publish the news.

albumen, and made other foul-smelling things into

In every newspaper-office in America the same struggle between the business-office and the news-department is going on all the time.

The weeks before he died, Mr Mohun Biswas, a journalist of Sikkim Street, St James , Port of Spain, was sacked. He had been ill for some time. In less than a year he had spent more than nine weeks at the Colonial Hospital and convalesced at home for even longer. When the doctor advised him to take a complete rest the 'Trinidad Sentinel' had no choice. It gave Mr Biswas three months' notice and continued, up to the time of his death, to supply him every morning with a free copy of the paper.

Grossman, perhaps tiring slightly of journalism, seems to have longed to convey his thoughts and feelings about the war in fictional form. At this stage, when the Soviet Union was fighting for its life, his ideas were very close to that of the Party line. It was only at Stalingrad, a year later, that his view of the Stalinist regime began to change. This outline, may well have formed part of the idea for The People Immortal, his novel written and published the following year...

Never lie, assess character, appeal to principles, answer every question, and determine what impediments might keep them from speaking. Reporters need persistence, not the name of some major publication behind them, to crack a story.

When I finally do leave this world, my epitaph will read, Keke McCoy: Former Jezebel turned journalist for the unsung.

Seriously?" Zuzana muttered. "As if he knows. Like he didn't tell the last twenty-five reporters because he was saving this excellent secret knowledge just for her?

Before this century shall run out, journalism will be the whole press. Mankind will write their book day by day, hour by hour, page by page. Thought will spread abroad with the rapidity of light--instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood at the extremities of the earth.

Newspapers will ultimately engross all literature.