Quotes by Journalists - Page 27

Uncertainty is as good a way as any to kill a story.
Sidney Zion
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
Journalism is the art of coming too late as early as possible. I’ll never master that.
Stig Dagerman
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
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
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
Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.
Erwin Knoll
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
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
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
I teach my students that you can't be a journalist if you are going to be judgmental. If you have a judgmental nuance as you pose a question, people will close down.
Robert S. Boynton
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
In an expansive attempt to establish a foothold among California's intelligentsia and create America's first truly national newspaper, The New York Times launched a slimmed-down West Coast edition in October 1962... The result in LA was a sorry stepsister of the great gray New York Times for its West Coast readers... Reprocessed news dictated from 3,000 miles away by editors who knew zip about what made Southern California tick.
Dennis McDougal
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
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
If you not longer let the community hear all of it's significant voices - you begin to have; a single narrow view of: the problems of the society,of the solutions of society - and you begun soon or later overwhelmed by the society you don't understand.
Ben Bagdikian
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
It's one thing to put on your nation's uniform to give your life for your country. But to dress up in black-market khakis and head into battle in a borrowed bush hat, armed only with a Nikon camera, 10 rolls of film and notebook, is definitely another thing.
Peter Arnett
It's great being a journalist, because our office is the world.
Rebecca Aguilar
From seven hundred journalists at the beginning of March, the number had dwindled to about one hundred and fifty—print reporters, TV correspondents, photographers, cameramen, and support personnel. At the press center I encountered Kazem, who only a week before I had asked for help with my visa. “Why are you staying when everyone else is leaving?” he asked. I took a chance and replied in Arabic. Some journalists, I said, are as samid as the Iraqi people. Samid means “steadfast” and “brave” and is the adjective most often used by Iraqis to describe themselves. Kazem laughed and threw his arm around my shoulder.
Richard Engel
Reporters go through four stages in a war zone. In the first stage, you’re Superman, invincible. In the second, you’re aware that things are dangerous and you need to be careful. In the third, you conclude that math and probability are working against you. In the fourth, you know you’re going to die because you’ve played the game too long. I was drifting into stage three.
Richard Engel
I may have been in stage four, but I wasn’t completely crazy. At least eighty-six journalists had been killed in Iraq, more than in any other conflict since World War II, and another thirty-eight had been taken hostage. More would die in the years to come. I knew I had to limit my movements and take special care when I did go out.
Richard Engel
Trouble seemed to follow me around. The late Tim Russert, my friend and the esteemed moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, once joked, “Richard, just don’t come to Washington.
Richard Engel
I could scarcely believe that my new home was engulfed by war before I even had time to find an apartment. It seemed that war followed me everywhere I went.
Richard Engel
In 2015, when I went back to the States or to an international conference, I found that people didn’t much care anymore. They saw the Middle East awash in blood, beyond redemption, and didn’t want to read about it or see it on the evening news. They just wanted to keep away from it.
Richard Engel
Then someone cried out, “Suicide bomber!” The crowd panicked. In the ensuing stampede, terrified pilgrims ran in both directions, many colliding in the middle of the bridge. A side railing collapsed under their weight, and scores leaped into the water whether they could swim or not. Hundreds were trampled to death. More than a thousand died. Hundreds of pairs of sandals were scattered around the bridge, left behind when pilgrims made their desperate dives into the river. I was given all of seventy-five seconds to tell the story on the Nightly News.
Richard Engel
When I came to the Middle East, journalists had a kind of immunity that allowed us to travel freely and meet with militants who hated Israel and the United States. In 2000, when I was working for Agence France-Presse, I didn’t feel fearful when I went to Gaza to meet with Hamas leaders or to the West Bank to speak to Palestinian gunmen. These men didn’t much like me. We didn’t have anything in common. But they felt that they had to treat me with common decency and a modicum of respect because I was a journalist and I was writing about them. They wanted to spin me so that I would give the world their version of events. They were never completely happy, of course, because my pieces didn’t make them look as perfect as they looked to themselves. But they needed to talk to me and other reporters because we were the only way they could get their story out. Now jump ahead to 2006. Zarqawi was on his killing spree in Iraq, and suddenly the Internet had become ubiquitous, and uploading videos on YouTube and other platforms was literally child’s play. So Zarqawi and his henchmen said to themselves, “Why should we let reporters interview us and filter what we say? We can go straight to the Internet and say exactly what we want, for as long as we want to say it, and we can post videos that Western journalists would never show.” Journalists became worthless, at least as megaphones. But we became valuable as commodities to be stolen, bought, and sold, traded for prisoners, or ransomed for millions.
Richard Engel
It's a journalist's job to be a witness to history. We're not there to worry about ourselves. We're there to try and get as near as we can, in an imperfect world, to the truth and get the truth out.
Robert Fisk
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
Let's be honest about journalists: We find a lot of ways of being wrong.
E.J. Dionne Jr.
He never asked me what I thought, and I never told him what I thought, because in my view that's the way a journalist ought to behave. You ought not to be going around to people volunteering your feelings. That's daily journalism.
Janet Malcolm
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.
Janet Malcolm
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.
Janet Malcolm
In North Korea, journalism, the job of telling the stories power and money do not want told, of giving a voice to the voiceless, does not exist.
John Sweeney
When I take risks now, I do so only when I have to and with every precaution. I used to prospect for news, dropping into places to see what was up. Well, I could go to parts of Libya today and find lots of good stories, but I probably wouldn’t be around to tell them.
Richard Engel
The rule of thumb for all news operations is that stories are assigned their importance on the basis of what affects or interests the greatest number of one's readers or viewers. Depending on the nature of the newspaper or broadcast, the balance between what "affects" and what "interests" is quite different. The first criteria of a responsible newspaper such as The New York Times is going to be that which their readers need to know about their world that day — those developments that in one way or another might affect their health, their pocketbooks, the future of themselves and their children. The first criterion of the tabloid is that which "interests" its readers — gossip, sex, scandal.
Walter Cronkite
It is hard for a writer to call an editor great, because it is natural for him to think of the editor as a writer manqué. It is like asking a thief to approve a fence, or a fighter to speak highly of a manager. “Fighters are sincere,” a fellow with the old pug’s syndrome said to me at a bar once as head wobbled and the hand that held his shot glass shook. “Managers are pimps, they sell our blood.” In the newspaper trade, confirmed reporters think confirmed editors are mediocrities who took the easy way out. These attitudes mark an excess of vanity coupled with a lack of imagination; it never occurs to a writer that anybody could have wanted to be anything else.
A.J. Liebling
Unanimity makes me itchy. It almost always hides a grave. I started digging.
Ben Ehrenreich
How can people trust social media over newspapers today?
Joel Landau
Go and nose out the next piece of shit... as one said in the trade. If nothing else was available, you could run an article on the latest miracle diet. That always worked.
Jonas Jonasson
Verbosity was an established Victorian trait.
Matthew Engel
It takes a lot of moola to fool around with national magazines, regardless of their politics. It takes even more if the paper is hell bent on shoving a hot poker up the rear end of the Establishment, as that editorial posture is not conducive to a massive influx of advertising dollars...a lot of people on the left still cherish the idea that Ramparts went under because I bought people drinks.
Warren Hinckle
Lesson: Never underestimate a woman. Or a chef.
Gwenda Bond
The thrill of working in this building, with its iconic globe on top, would never fade.
Gwenda Bond
If you don't hit a newspaper reader between the eyes with your first sentence, there is no need of writing a second one.
Arthur Brisbane
The press has the power to stimulate people to clean up the environment prevent nuclear proliferation force crooked politicians out of office reduce poverty provide quality health care for all people and even to save the lives of millions of people as it did in Ethiopia in 1984. But instead we are using it to promote sex violence and sensationalism and to line the pockets of already wealthy media moguls.’ Dr Carl Jensen founder of Project Censored
Ian Hargreaves
Tip to all British tabloids: Do Not Hack Amy Winehouse's Phone. I repeat: Do Not Hack Amy Winehouse's Phone.
Jonah Goldberg
Janet Malcolm had famously described journalism as the art of seduction and betrayal. Any reporter who didn't see journalism as "morally indefensible" was either "too stupid" or "too full of himself," she wrote. I disagreed. Without shutting the door on the possibility that I was both stupid and full of myself, I'd never bought into the seduction and betrayal conceit. At most, journalism - particularly when writing about media-hungry public figures - was like the seduction of a prostitute. The relationship was transactional. They weren't talking to me because they liked me or because I impressed them; they were talking to me because they wanted the cover of Rolling Stone.
Michael Hastings
‎Theorists of journalism have long noted parallels to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in physics: by reporting on something, one subtly but irrevocably changes it.
Ben Yagoda
My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does.
Joan Didion
I think I was always interested in the larger world, even as a kid, and my experiences as a journalist only heightened that interest. Covering conflict, I learned that though leaders often try to create a sense of "us" and "them," the differences are not that delineated. I often felt like it was a whole bunch of "us," with some of "them" scattered around. That made me feel that the borders we draw around ourselves are often artificial.
Masha Hamilton
...what I'm getting at is like the distinction between tourist and a traveler. The tourist experience is superficial and glancing. The traveler develops a deeper connection with her surroundings. She is more invested in them -- the traveler stays longer, makes her own plans, chooses her own destination, and usually travels alone: solo travel and solo participation, although the most difficult emotionally, seem the most likely to produce a good story.
Ted Conover
I don't think a tough question is disrespectful.
Helen Thomas
The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.
Hunter S. Thompson
People sometimes imagine that just because they have access to so many newspapers, radio and TV channels, they will get an infinity of different opinions. Then they discover that things are just the opposite: the power of these loudspeakers only amplifies the opinion prevalent at a certain time, to the point where it covers any other opinion.
Amin Maalouf
I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.
Christopher Hitchens
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.
Christopher Hitchens
The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.
Malcolm Gladwell
Despite different cultures, middle-class youth all over the world seem to live their lives as if in a parallel universe. They get up in the morning, put on their Levi's and Nikes, grab their caps and backpacks, and Sony personal CD players and head for school.
Naomi Klein