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"I didn't like the competitiveness of big-time journalism."
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"The Congressional leaders set the agenda for journalism; it's not the other way around."
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Personal Development
"Journalism never admits that nothing much is happening."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces."
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Personal Development
"The two keys to success as a sportswriter are: 1) A blind willingness to believe anything you're told by the coaches, flacks, hustlers and other "official spokesmen" for the team-owners who provide the free booze ... and: 2) A Roget's Thesaurus, in order to avoid using the same verbs and adjectives twice in the same paragraph.Even a sports editor, for instance, might notice something wrong with a lead that said: "The precision-jack-hammer attack of the Miami Dolphins stomped the balls off the Washington Redskins today by stomping and hammering with one precise jack-thrust after another up the middle, mixed with pinpoint-precision passes into the flat and numerous hammer-jack stomps around both ends...."
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Personal Development
"Newspapermen ask dumb questions. They look up at the sun and ask if it is shining."
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Personal Development
"Deep Throat did serve the public interest by providing the guidance and information to us."
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Personal Development
"The central dilemma in journalism is that you don't know what you don't know."
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Personal Development
"In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate."
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Personal Development
"I'm an expert on the NewsHour and it isn't how I practice journalism. I am not involved in the story. I serve only as a reporter or someone asking questions. I am not the story."
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"A country so rich that it can send people to the moon still has hundreds of thousands of its citizens who can't read. That's terribly troubling to me."
People
"It was so much fun to have the freedom to wander America, with no assignments. For 25 or 30 years I never had an assignment. These were all stories I wanted to do myself."
Media
"When I worked in Los Angeles covering hard news, very often when something important would happen I'd be off in the woods covering something unimportant, which was more interesting to me."
News
"When we become a really mature, grown-up, wise society, we will put teachers at the center of the community, where they belong. We don't honor them enough, we don't pay them enough."
Society
"I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading."
Reading
"In television, everything is gone with the speed of light, literally. It is no field for anybody with intimations of immortality."
Media
"I wasn't a very discriminating reader. I read just about everything that came along."
Reading
"I recognize that I had a good deal of good luck in my life. I came along at a time when it was pretty easy to get a job in journalism. I went to work at CBS News when I was about 22, and within a year or so was reporting on the air."
Time
"I suppose I was a little bit of what would be called today a nerd. I didn't have girlfriends, and really I wasn't a very social boy."
Friendship
"I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time."
Age
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