top of page
Exlpore more Media quotes

"When the New York Times scratches its head, get ready for total baldness as you tear out your hair."

"Pro-government press is not a press it is just a lie-generating ugly machine; it is a guard dog, guarding only the official thieves, not the public!"

"Sensationalism dies quickly, fear is long-lived."

"If you interviewed 1,000 politicians and asked about whether the media's too soft or too hard, about 999 would say too hard."

"Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation."

"The minute viewers callin or write about your looks, they were not listening to what you were saying."

"This is the truth about mainstream media and advertising: People wouldn't have to pay to show you such messages if they were right."

"If you're nice, decent, attractive, get good grades and are talented, no one wants to read about that...They want to read what's out-of-the-ordinary, the scandalous, the shocking and the tragic. They want a story; they want to be captivated and what's typical does not give them that...unless, of course, that person ends up a victim, commits a crime or loses their minds via a love affair."

"When the name of Gail Wynand became a threat in the publishing world, a group of newspaper owners took him aside-at a city charity affair which all had to attend-and reproached him for what they called hid debasement of the public taste."It is not my function" said Wynand, "to help people preserve a self-respect they haven't got. You give them what they profess to like in public, I give them what they really like. Honesty is the best policy, gentlemen, though not quite in the sense you were taught to belive"."
Explore more quotes by John Pomfret

"When I see somebody being mistreated, my eyes tear up and I want to stop it. And I believe that the best thing I can do is to write about it, because if I insert myself into the equation it doesn't really do much good, but if I write about it I think it could do more good."

"I think to a certain extent in Bosnia and among the Hutus in Rwanda and also among the Tutsis in Rwanda who then took revenge on the Hutus, there is a sense of being swept up and a sense that the society in which they live has gone mad."

"One of the problems that we have as American journalists is that we bring the American cultural baggage with us and we plop it down and it follows us around and that's just a fact of life."

"The desire to become a journalist came really because I very much like living abroad, and like to travel, and wanted to be paid for it."

"A lot of times when we work overseas we tend to put the experience of someone who lives overseas, a Chinese person or a Korean person or a Bosnian person, within the prism of an American life."

"I went back to the States and started at a small newspaper in Riverside County, California, covering the police; I was making $280 a week covering the police."

"I think some of the best reporters are the ones who can really illustrate the differences between societies, at the same time trying to connect the fact that there are a lot of shared values in addition to those differences."

"But on the other hand, in the midst of the chaos, you find normal people. You find people who are willing to risk their lives to tell you what they saw, even though they have no dog in the fight."

"I was fourteen when Kissinger made his secret trip to China, and then there was subsequently Nixon's trip to China, and I was very much seized with an interest in China."
bottom of page