Quotes About Journalism

A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser.

Isn't the media supposed to keep government responsible?

Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease and luxury until the appointed day where their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses — the days of interviews — are over. And still they say yes when a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife.

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

Unlike other relationships that have a purpose beyond themselves and are clearly delineated as such (dentist-patient, lawyer-client, teacher-student), the writer-subject relationship seems to depend for its life on a kind of fuzziness and murkiness, if not utter covertness, of purpose. If everybody put his cards on the table, the game would be over. The journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced state of moral anarchy.

People tell journalists their stories as characters and dreams deliver their elliptical messages: without warning, without context, without concern for how odd they will sound when the dreamer awakens and repeats them.

EVERY journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like

The Fox News makeup treatment is unlike any other in journalism. It involves false lashes, layers and layers of foundation, and heavy applications of come-hither lip gloss.

You might not be able to operate your own Learjet and have an unlimited expense account, but if you have a reasonable expectation for a print-based product, whether it's a newspaper or a magazine, you can certainly exist.

Just as there are moments when the words flow and it feels like the easiest job in the world, there are many more when I think I have nothing to say, and my journalism training taught me that writing is a job, that you write whether you are inspired or not, and that the only way to unlock creativity is to write through it.

My mother was a journalist, so writing is not unnatural to me.

After 9/11, many of the most important news outlets in America abdicated their role as a check to power - the journalistic responsibility to challenge the excesses of government - for fear of being seen as unpatriotic and punished in the market during a period of heightened nationalism.

U.S. journalists I don't think are very courageous. They tend to go along with the government's policy domestically and internationally. To question is seen as being unpatriotic, or potentially subversive.

Journalists always explain that people are mad at them because they tell the truth, which is often unpleasant or uncomfortable to hear. However, they fail in situations where there is more than one truth.

We don't go into journalism to be popular. It is our job to seek the truth and put constant pressure on our leaders until we get answers.

We never see any journalism or documentaries on the oceans and what we're doing on this Earth and how it affects the oceans and how important they are. I'm intrigued by it. It's almost an untold story.

The kind of in-depth investigative journalism we practice at 'Frontline' is thoughtful, rigorous, and time-intensive. It requires us to constantly seek untold stories and to give our producers and reporters the time and resources to dig into them deeply.

There is a very uneasy relationship between money and creativity, between money and almost everything. Its tendency to control and corrupt - whether it's in arts or education or politics, hardly anything is untouched by it. Journalism certainly is up there. Everything is susceptible to it.

I think it is quite untrue that it is standard journalistic practice to name the interviewer when quoting from an interview.

In the most polarized and passionate, the most angry and aggressive news environment in recent memory, my job as a journalist requires me - often - to push back in live interviews against comments that are unfair, untrue, or leave me thinking, 'Is this seriously happening right now?'

I would be lying if I said the journalism doesn't reflect my own choices as a reporter and a writer: what to say, what to emphasize, how to say it, what is true or untrue.

It is not unusual to send someone to conduct an interview you don't have time to conduct. It's what we do.

The fact of the matter is, particularly when covering a campaign, which is a very high-speed story, it's incredibly unusual for the reporter to be in the same place as the dateline when the story is filed.

It's not unusual for me to find that I'm the only female journalist of color in the front row during some of the briefings.