Journalism Quotes

The dictator’s black hand hadmade China a birdcage wrapped in red flags.--From Balloons

~ Zoë S. Roy

If you end up with the story you started with, you weren't listening along the way.

~ Matt Heineman

The local liberal press, much molested by the censorship, had its courageous and skilful writers such as VM Doroshevich, the master of that semi-literary and semi-journalistic essay at which Bronstein himself was one day to excel.

~ Isaac Deutscher

A moment from another world! Imagine a reporter dictating an exclusive story, a lead story, sourced from the President of the United States, from a telephone just off the White House dance floor to the strains of Lester Lanin's dance band.

~ Ben Bradlee

Cherchez la femme is good advice for investigative reporters. Follow the money is even better advice.

~ Ben Bradlee

But journalists thrive on not knowing exactly what the future holds. That's part of the excitement. Something interesting, something important, will happen somewhere, as sure as God made sour apples, and a good aggressive newspaper will become part of that something.

~ Ben Bradlee

Mort moved my ending to the beginning, took out all the adjectives, cut the whole thing in half, and made it one hundred percent better.'That's how it's done,' he said. Best writing lesson I ever had.

~ Anita Diamant

To assure him, Peter Lim decided that the newsroom adopt this approach: it was better to produce the best story than the first story. He had good reason. Finding scoops in a Singapore with many OB markers carried a real risk: the story was sometimes incomplete or, as in the case of the bus fare increase, premature. For completeness, you sometimes incomplete or, as in the case of the bus fare increase, premature. For completeness, you sometimes had to rely on official spokesmen. But once they knew you were on the story, they either prevailed on the editors to hold it until the time was right to release it, or gave it to every newspaper. The edict went against the grain. No journalist could resist the temptation to be first with the news.

~ Cheong Yip Seng

You will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and it hurts both ways--but it doesn't hurt as much when you're right.

~ Hunter S. Thompson

Do you still think the world is vast? That if there is a conflagration in one place it does not have a bearing on another, and that you can sit it out in peace on your veranda admiring your absurd petunias?

~ Anna Politkovskaya

I've always wanted to be a journalist, but what am I going to do? Write articles about which movie star had the fat sucked from her ass and injected into her face? Which professional athlete just confessed to shooting steroids? The last celebrity baby names? Cara lowered both brows in frustration. Who cares?

~ Melissa Landers

Thanks to my solid academic training, today I can write hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information, which is how I got a good job in journalism.

~ Dave Barry

Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.

~ Erwin Knoll

There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch of the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.

~ Oscar Wilde

We are drifting into some ugly parallels here, and if I'd written this kind of thing two years ago I'd pick up the New York Times and see myself mangled all over the Op-Ed page... And then beaten into a bloody coma the next evening by some hired thugs in an alley behind the National Press Building.....

~ Hunter S. Thompson

It had occurred to her that the ultimate expression of Tom Wolfe’s ‘saturation reporting’ was possibly at hand: the copycat murder of the journalist, with the murderer finishing the piece and filing it, complete with photographs and videos.

~ David Cronenberg

Now listen,' said George angrily, 'I’ve been in a newspaper office all evening and I know better than you what’s going on.''Nonsense. If there’s one place in the world where nobody knows what’s going on, it’s a newspaper office.

~ Jack Iams

Someone was waving a large pink-and-white sign that read, Don't Worry, Be Happy. I was trying, and so were at least thirty thousand other bodies, with varying degrees of post-Aquarian patience, to see the Who for the first time in a year.

~ Ellen Willis

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.

~ Janet Malcolm

Say what you wish about media in the Arab world, but say it knowing that no media channel in the world is absolutely free.

~ Aysha Taryam

As the final computerized decade of the twentieth century came into view, time itself seemed to speed up and compress into smaller and smaller bytes, leaving less and less time over the breakfast table to ruminate on the fascinating aboriginal lore from the Australian outback or on the clandestine Israeli airlift of Ethiopian Jews out of southern Sudan. Readers preferred news that affected their own lives and they wanted it now. Leisure time was a luxury that fewer and fewer times subscribers enjoyed.

~ Dennis Mcdougal

Upon descending our threaded words on the web by a steep and hazardous precipice of readers requires constant review.

~ Msconcerned

How we react to the tragedy of one small person accurately reflects our attitude towards a whole nationality, and increasing the numbers doesn't change much.

~ Anna Politkovskaya

These empty pages are your future, soon to become your past. They will read the most personal tale you shall ever find in a book.

~ Anonymous

The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be part of it. If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without first-expierience is a fool and a fraud.

~ Hunter S. Thompson

The byline is a replacement for many other things, not the least of them money. If someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism as a profession, what will be apparent will be the need for gratification—if not instant, then certainly relatively immediate. Reporters take sustenance from their bylines; they are a reflection of who you are, what you do, and why, to an uncommon degree, you exist. ... A journalist always wonders: If my byline disappears, have I disappeared as well?

~ David Halberstam

Interviews were invented to make journalism less passive. Instead of waiting for something to happen, journalists ask someone what should or could happen.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

At least a circus performance does not last long, and the regime availing itself of the services of clownish journalists has the longevity of a mouldering mushroom.

~ Anna Politkovskaya

Equal time is not necessary when dealing with evil. Nazis do not merit equal or fair treatment.

~ Robert Fisk

Opponents past and present have the same essential weakness about them: first they want to use you, then they want to be you, then they want to snuff you out.

~ Julian Assange

What matter is the information, not what you think about it.

~ Anna Politkovskaya

The job of a journalist is to amplify the voices of the marginalized. To do that, you have to hear those voices in the first place.

~ Allison Kilkenny

Most journalists are impatient to get their legwork done and to start the actual writing

~ David Halberstam

The new world will be a place of answers and no questions, because the only questions left will be answered by computers, because only computers will know what to ask

~ James Cameron

Uncertainty is as good a way as any to kill a story.

~ Sidney Zion

Newspapers, of course, need both news and fanfare. A blending of gossip and truth.

~ Paul Tobin

The fault I find in our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other everyday, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.

~ Marcel Proust

If it’s true that nothing is more potent than an idea, then those who control the media can direct minds en masse.

~ Lance Morcan

I chiefly concern myself with those who seldom get a hearing, & I don't feel it is incumbent on me to balance their voices with the well-crafted apologetics of the powerful. The powerful are generally excellently served by the mainstream media or propaganda organs. The powerful should be quoted, yes, but to measure their pronouncements against the truth, not to obscure it.

~ Joe Sacco

How the press, for example, loves to brag to its victims— its readers—about its freedom. Yes, the press may be free to lie and distort and suppress and deceive and malign, but is it free to tell the truth?

~ Willis Carto