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"Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation."
"We have no authoritative figure, no Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow whom we all listen to and trust to sort out contradictory claims. Instead, the media is splintered into a thousand fragments, each with its own version of reality, each claiming the loyalty of a splintered nation."
"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"."
"In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That's the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it."
"The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance."
"There's not a branch of publishing or broadcasting that doesn't depend in some way on advertising. It'd be like an aquarium without water. Why, ninety-five percent of the information that reaches you has already been preselected and paid for."
Explore more quotes by John Pomfret
"Working overseas is more difficult in that it's much more complicated to get people to open their hearts to you and to tell you information."
"In some ways the domestic reporting is a lot easier because Americans will talk to you about anything."
"And when they do spin out of control there are important ramifications that affect America, not just its direct national interest but its broader interests as a nation which has thought of itself as a beacon to other nations, of freedom, liberty, democracy, whatever."
"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."
"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."
"For me the much more significant question is what did the Americans do, if anything, to help the Croatian army, because they are the ones that changed fundamentally the map of Bosnia, not the Bosnian army."
"I grew up in New York City in the late '70s, at a time when U.S. - China relations were something that was on the front page of The New York Times on a regular basis."
"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."
"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."
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