Quotes About Journalism

'The New York Times' is a great newspaper: it is also No Fun.

It's hard to get into Newsweek because, as more of our former intellectual magazines take on a pop focus, if there's no buzz, there's no interest.

I have no interest in interfering or involving myself in journalistic integrity or process.

'The Lady' is a piddling little magazine that no one cares about or buys.

London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.

No honest journalist should be willing to describe himself or herself as 'embedded.' To say, 'I'm an embedded journalist' is to say, 'I'm a government Propagandist.

There's an awful lot you can find in the press. If you do what you really ought to do, start by reading every article from the end, back to the front; most of the lies are up in the front. Turns out there's a lot of stuff back there.

Chomsky's description of the neoliberal/corporate hold over our economy, polity, journalism, and culture is so powerful and overwhelming that for some readers it can produce a sense of resignation. In our demoralized political times, a few may go a step further and conclude that we are enmeshed in this regressive system because, alas, humanity is simply incapable of creating a more humane, egalitarian, and democratic social order.

Most people are not liars. They can't tolerate too much cognitive dissonance. I don't want to deny that there are outright liars, just brazen propagandists. You can find them in journalism and in the academic professions as well. But I don't think that's the norm. The norm is obedience, adoption of uncritical attitudes, taking the easy path of self-deception.

From the essay Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again 1. Journalists sometimes make things up. 2. Journalists sometimes get things wrong. 3. Almost all books that are published as memoirs were initially written as novels, and then the agent/editor said, This might work better as a memoir. 6. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.

It was exciting in its own self-absorbed way, which is very much the essence of journalism: you truly believe that you are living at the center of the universe and that the world out there is on tenterhooks waiting for the next copy of whatever publication you work at.

People who are drawn to journalism are usually people who, because of their cynicism or emotional detachment or reserve or whatever, are incapable of being anything but witnesses to events. Something prevents them from becoming involved, committed, and allows them to remain separate.

As a longtime journalist, this quote from the delicious Nora Ephron made me smile in recognition of its truth: Working as a journalist is exactly like being the wallflower at the orgy...everyone else is having a marvelous time, laughing merrily, eating, drinking, having sex in the back room, and I am standing on the side taking notes.

I was a journalist and I liked to watch. I was in awe.

The nineties were a golden age for metropolitan newspapers and glossy magazines, yet most copies were destroyed or recycled within a month and never converted to digital files. It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.

Telling the truth wasn't sufficient power. As consolation the remaining journalists convinced themselves that no absolute truths existed. This new untruth they propagated as the new truth. The entertainment value, the ability to titillate or provoke, came to be the litmus test of any new truth.

So much for the journalist and the news being mutually exclusive. Nash

the remaining journalists convinced themselves that no absolute truths existed.

They were the paper of record, which meant they were in the business of protecting the system

El verdadero peligro de un ensayo de esta índole no radica en que se detecte un enfoque personal, sino en que se escriba con un tinte tendencioso.

We don't need a press like the Americans have, Ahmed. One that spews lies and distortions twenty-four hours a day in search of profits.

The public never saw how producers and executives juiced up stories. Exaggerating some details and downplaying or ignoring others. How they went after something or someone, not based on how strong or important the story was, but what their ratings books told them.

If they asked me, I did two shifts. I did sports, I did news, because I loved it.

During the first nineteen months of the epidemic, the New York Times wrote about it a total of seven times: