Quotes by Journalists - Page 52

I'm an unabashed elitist. Everyone needs a good editor, and there is peril in worshiping amateurism and the unedited in science, art, and journalism.
K. Lee Lerner
Journalism is not a precise science, it's a crude art
Dan Rather
They sit beside each other on one of the sofas, Warwick leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, Joanne resting back with her arms behind her head. Never known as advocates of establishmentarianism, they have been applauded, ridiculed, and misunderstood by the media, and, in particular, criticized for their avarice. They have agreed to do this interview without "cabbage" (payment), but generally charge ten to twenty thousand dollars for the privilege. Even so, why should they be castigated for exploiting a medium that has exploited them? They see the situation simply enough: quid pro quo, and hold the mustard.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
Look at the language. If a scientist delivers the simple, unconditional, absolutely certain statements that politicians and journalists want, he is talking as an activist, not a scientist.
Daniel Gardner
The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no 'normal' because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously.
Chuck Klosterman
The BFMSS [British False Memory Syndrome Society]The founder of the 'false memory' movement in Britain is an accused father. Two of his adult daughters say that Roger Scotford sexually abused them in childhood. He denied this and responded by launching a spectacular counter-attack, which enjoyed apparently unlimited and uncritical air time in the mass media and provoke Establishment institutions that had made no public utterance about abuse to pronounce on the accused adults' repudiation of it.p171-172The 'British False Memory Syndrome Society' lent a scientific aura to the allegations - the alchemy of 'falsehood' and 'memory' stirred with disease and science. The new name pathologised the accusers and drew attention away from the accused. But the so-called syndrome attacked not only the source of the stories but also the alliances between the survivors' movement and practitioners in the health, welfare, and the criminal justice system. The allies were represented no longer as credulous dupes but as malevolent agents who imported a miasma of the 'false memories' into the imaginations of distressed victims.Roger Scotford was a former naval officer turned successful property developer living in a Georgian house overlooking an uninterrupted valley in luscious middle England. He was a rich man and was able to give up everything to devote himself to the crusade.He says his family life was normal and that he had been a 'Dr Spock father'. But his first wife disagrees and his second wife, although believing him innocent, describes his children's childhood as very difficult. His daughters say they had a significantly unhappy childhood.In the autumn of 1991, his middle daughter invited him to her home to confront him with the story of her childhood. She was supported by a friend and he was invited to listen and then leave. She told him that he had abused her throughout her youth. Scotford, however, said that the daughter went to a homeopath for treatment for thrush/candida and then blamed the condition on him. He also said his daughter, who was in her twenties, had been upset during a recent trip to France to buy a property. He said he booked them into a hotel where they would share a room. This was not odd, he insisted, 'to me it was quite natural'. He told journalists and scholars the same story, in the same way, reciting the details of her allegations, drawing attention to her body and the details of what she said he had done to her. Some seemed to find the detail persuasive. Several found it spooky.p172-173
Beatrix Campbell
As always, imagine how great the press corps would be if it devoted 1/1000th the energy to dissecting non-sex political wrongdoing
Glenn Greenwald
A loose definition of the Tea Party might be fifteen million pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the small handful of banks and investment companies who advertise on Fox and CNBC.
Matt Taibbi
The mainstream media act just like in the classic studies of herd animals; at the exact instant more than half of the herd makes a move to bolt, they all move.
Matt Taibbi
When there is no news, we will give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.
David Brinkley
When you turn on the news, it's the same old rich white people that have systematically ruined this country regurgitating the same tired, stale ideas. And they keep getting invited back.
Allison Kilkenny Jamie Kilstein
The media's job is to serve as society's referee, throwing down truth flags when uninformed bigots are shouting their opinions into the wind.
Allison Kilkenny Jamie Kilstein
Those who make objectivity a religion are liars. they are scared of human pain. They dont want to be objective, it's a lie: they want to be objects, so as not to suffer.
Eduardo Galeano
Freedom of the press can never be the licence to say anything one desires. Freedom of the press is not the freedom to slander and attack and must never be used to fight other people’s wars. It does not mean manipulating a story into speaking your views. One might think it common sense but in the world of journalism a lot of what makes sense is lost to the lure of favouritism, greed and fame. Sadly, in this truth-telling business truth is hard to find.
Aysha Taryam
Part of the problem is that people at our school don't listen. They just put on the headphones and tune out the world. It's intimidating.
Alexandra Robbins
The networks at their worst (were) at once greedy and timid.
David Halberstam
They were interchangeable tools, and the catchy phrases continued without abatement.
Robert A. Caro
The cost of independence has dropped.
Jeff Jarvis
The type of journalism that relies on the reporter's notion of what does or doesn't "seem" correct or controversial is self-indulgent and irresponsible. It gives credence to the belief that we can intuit our way through all the various decisions we need to make in our lives and it validates the notion that our feelings are a more reliable barometer of reality than the facts.
Seth Mnookin
Everything we hate about the media today was present at its creation: its corrupt or craven practitioners, its easy manipulation by the powerful, its capacity for propagating lies, its penchant for amplifying rage. Also present was everything we admire and require: factual information, penetrating analysis, probing investigation, truth spoken to power.
Brooke Gladstone
There's a long-standing debate in the media biz over whether the news outlets should give the public what it wants, or what it needs. This debate presupposes that media execs actually know what it wants or needs. And that there actually is a unitary "public.
Brooke Gladstone
How would we flood village and city with our information? The people must learn how well I govern them. How would they know if we didn't tell them?
Frank Herbert
Behavior was better when cinemas were opulent.
George F. Will
Television news is akin to audible wallpaper.
George F. Will
Most importantly, the epidemic was only news when it was not killing homosexuals. In this sense, AIDS remained a fundamentally gay disease, newsworthy only by the virtue of the fact that it sometimes hit people who weren't gay,
Randy Shilts
New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at. Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list.
Cory Doctorow
In all sorts of markets—music, film, art, and politics—the future of popularity will be harder to predict as the broadcast power of radio and television democratizes and the channels of exposure grow.... The gatekeepers had their day. Now there are simply too many gates to keep.
Derek Thompson
There is a huge trapdoor waiting to open under anyone who is critical of so-called 'popular culture' or (to redefine this subject) anyone who is uneasy about the systematic, massified cretinization of the major media. If you denounce the excess coverage, you are yourself adding to the excess. If you show even a slight knowledge of the topic, you betray an interest in something that you wish to denounce as unimportant or irrelevant. Some writers try to have this both ways, by making their columns both 'relevant' and 'contemporary' while still manifesting their self-evident superiority. Thus—I paraphrase only slightly—'Even as we all obsess about Paris Hilton, the people of Darfur continue to die.' A pundit like (say) Bob Herbert would be utterly lost if he could not pull off such an apparently pleasing and brilliant 'irony.
Christopher Hitchens
You have to get up pretty early in the morning to invent the news.
Lauren Beukes
If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable.
Edward R. Murrow
We are in the same tent as the clowns and the freaks-that's show business.
Edward R. Murrow
When the New York Times scratches its head, get ready for total baldness as you tear out your hair.
Christopher Hitchens
The more interesting life becomes, in other words, the more boredom we are doomed to experience.
Susan Maushart
Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward.
Finley Peter Dunne
American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.
H.L. Mencken
Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.
Edward R. Murrow
We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.
Edward R. Murrow
...a bard's down-to-earth love: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red and when she walks, treads on the ground...
John Geddes
...you called me poet-priest - I am. ...devoted to my art, faithful to you...or, is the other way around?...
John Geddes
...what else would a poet priest do on an endless night, but write of love?...
John Geddes
...I guess you're right - I am a priest - I offer sacrifices - so take this line, I want you to have something of mine...
John Geddes
One's-Self I Sing One's-self I sing, a simple separate person, Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse. Of physiology from top to toe I sing, Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far, The Female equally with the Male I sing. Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, Cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine, The Modern Man I sing.
Walt Whitman
Without intending to, without even knowing it, he demonstrated with his life that his father had been right when he repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager so lucid or dangerous, than a poet.
Gabriel García Márquez
I do not say these things for a dollar, or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat;
Walt Whitman
The American bards shall be marked for generosity and affection and for encouraging competitors… . The great poets are also to be known by the absence in them of tricks and by the justification of perfect personal candor… . How beautiful is candor! All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.
Walt Whitman
from a child in danger to a dangerous child
Edward Humes
Just a child. All this time we've feared you, sought you. And you're nothing more than a human child.
Joshua Winning
...his lazy eye drifting around the room like a child looking for the bathroom.
Chuck Klosterman
WHAT am I, after all, but a child, pleas’d with the sound of my own name? repeating it over and over;t I stand apart to hear—it never tires me.t To you, your name also;t Did you think there was nothing but two or three pronunciations in the sound of your name?
Walt Whitman
She had not given me the cross to keep the bad men away, as a child might have been expected to do. No, in her mind the bad men could not be kept away. They were coming, and they would have to be faced.
John Connolly
I can see that an insufficent, or perhaps even defective, socialization process has led you to believe that four-letter words add power to languauge
Douglas Preston
...I don't want what other men see in you- you the you I want is invisible but it is the part of you I really love...
John Geddes
...Ah, but the Moon my Love is jealous, and can you blame him? You outshine him with your virtues...
John Geddes
A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful.
Frank Herbert
The knives of jealousy are honed on details.
Ruth Rendell
If you're not at least a tiny bit jealous at this point, you might want to check for your own pulse.
Emily Matchar
The steel suddenly touched her heart. Ah, jealousy, it was jealousy, the cold hand mashing her slowly, squeezing her, diminishing her soul.
Clarice Lispector
Stay away to abuse and misemploy knowledge, and neutrality with jealousy since it reflects the lack of sense.
Ehsan Sehgal
The jealousy holds neither the colours and nor the places. It is voiceless and timeless a time bomb within you to blow up only you, not others.
Ehsan Sehgal
JEALOUS, adj. Unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping.
Ambrose Bierce