Quotes About Journalism

I stopped buying Sunday papers about 15 years ago, because you'd buy handfuls of them, and what you got, because the hard news comes from so many other channels, was opinion pieces. You're better off spending the money on a good novel.

In the mid-nineties, I quit my job as a senior feature writer at 'The Mail' on Sunday in the U.K. and became a 'ghost writer,' collaborating with politicians, pop stars, psychologists, soldiers and sporting legends who needed help in penning their autobiographies.

The Murdoch-owned 'Sunday Times' has an appalling history of involvement in illegal activity. And it's because they're Sunday papers; they're trying to get scoops that the dailies haven't got.

Ever since I left the 'Sunday Times' there has been a group of scribes waiting for me to fall on my face, and having a go at my commercial record, looking to pick holes in it.

The daily press, the immediate media, is superb at synecdoche, at giving us a small thing that stands for a much larger thing. Reporters on the ground, embedded or otherwise, can tell us about or send us pictures of what happened in that place at that time among those people.

Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature.

Malcolm Muggeridge, that peripatetic journalist who traveled the globe for more than six decades of his life, said that if God is dead somebody else is going to have to take His place. It will either be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Hefner. To

investigation. Whatever the outcome, the reporter knew that the denouement would be a stormy one. To

And that's the way it is.

Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.

In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story.

Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy.

I felt that I had been driven from the temple where for nineteen years, along with other believers, I had worshiped the great god News on a daily basis.

I think when money starts to corrupt journalism, it undermines the journalism, and it undermines the credibility of the product, and you end up not succeeding.

We have to compete in a universe of 200 networks, so we have to carve out our own niche, and to me, that niche is just basic shoe-leather journalism with some good journalists at the helm you can trust as presenters.

This is how it works now with the news: the story begins with a moral, then a narrative is fashioned to support it.

A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society.

There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil - remain detached from the great

A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.

There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil.

Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea! This is Walter Winchell in New York. Let's go to press.

The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves - and the better the teacher, the better the student body.

You're miserable, edgy and tired. You're in the perfect mood for journalism.

Journalism is just a gun. It's only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that's all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world.