Journalism Quotes - Page 3

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

Journalism is the art of coming too late as early as possible. I’ll never master that.

Stig Dagerman

Factual reporting is all too often propaganda designed to provoke certain reactions from the masses.

James Morcan

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

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

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

MsConcerned

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a time when society is drowning in tsunamis of misinformation, it is possible to change the world for the better if we repeat the truth often and loud enough.

Alberto Cairo

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

It's great being a journalist, because our office is the world.

Rebecca Aguilar

Las Vegas, the most expensive toilet in the world that still can’t flush.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

He turned and gave the Dark Elf a nasty look. “They can do that,” he said, “mess with your head, using arcane mind control techniques. Well-known fact.”The Dark Elf sniggered. “I wish,” he said. “Sadly, no. You’re thinking of journalism, which is slightly different.

Tom Holt

The truth is usually somewhere in the gray turbulent eddies set in motion by the mixture of black and white.

Ken Poirot

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

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

Journalism delivers news, but not necessarily relevance.

Khang Kijarro Nguyen

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

Enlighten the people, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

Thomas Jefferson

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Journalism Quotes - Page 3

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