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Journalism Quotes
"Before Truman Capote, journalism and non-fiction weren't taken very seriously."
185
"Before Truman, journalism and non-fiction weren't taken very seriously."
169
"My own view, there is a need for and a demonstrated need for more journalism now than there ever has been."
119
"Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism."
86
"The Congressional leaders set the agenda for journalism; it's not the other way around."
85
"And I believe that good journalism, good television, can make our world a better place."
74
"Journalism constructs momentarily arrested equilibriums and gives disorder an implied order. That is already two steps from reality."
72
"Without sounding too pretentious, I was sort of a slave to the narrative. When the narrative cracks in, I have to go where it takes me. I had to go to the Bohemian Grove. It was the obvious end to the book."
71
"It's always been my formula to get the next picture set up before anyone's seen the last one."
70
"For many years I was engaged in journalism, writing articles and chronicles for the daily press without ever joining the staff of any newspaper."
69
"I've created a vocabulary of different styles. I draw from many different ways to take a picture. Sometimes I go back to reportage, to journalism."
68
"I never believed that Nixon could fully resurrect himself. And the proof of that was in the obits."
66
"If an investigative reporter finds out that someone has been robbing the store, that may be "gotcha" journalism, but it's also good journalism."
64
"The Nixon administration really put a lot of pressure on CBS not to run the second broadcast."
64
"Amin hid nothing. Everybody knew everything. Yet the American Senate only introduced a resolution breaking off trade with Amin three months before his overthrow."
62
"I worked for a newspaper in Europe for, I lived in Europe for about seven years, so I worked in this sort of a yellow journalism kind of a thing, it was like a scandal sheet."
61
"Newspapers that are truly independent, like The Washington Post, can still aggressively investigate anyone or anything with no holds barred."
61
"We were right about the slush fund. But Sloan did not testify about it to the Grand Jury."
61
"In the end, Dan Rather's legend skewered him, CBS and the craft of journalism."
57
"If you're curious, you'll probably be a good journalist because we follow our curiosity like cats."
57
"Local television news, on both radio and television, is so appalling. Makes print journalism look like the greatest stuff ever written."
57
"I realize that I am not a journalist. So anything I say is not important."
57
"I started on the fringes of journalism as a cartoonist on The Daily Mail."
56
"The biggest rap on me is that I don't find a Watergate every couple of years. Well, Watergate was unique. It's not something Carl Bernstein, I, or the Washington Post caused."
56
"An investigation may take six months. A quick interview, profile, a day."
56
"All the libel lawyers will tell you there's no libel any more, that everyone's given up."
55
"The last copy of the Chicago Daily News I picked up had three crime stories on its front page. But by comparison to the gaudy days, this is small-time stuff. Chicago is as full of crooks as a saw with teeth, but the era when they ruled the city is gone forever."
55
"In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right."
55
"It's no longer just reporting the headlines of the day, but trying to put the headlines into some context and to add some perspective into what they mean."
55
"Conditions were so hard. To send the news out, telex was the only means, but telex was very rare in Africa. So if somebody was flying to Europe, we gave him correspondence to send after he arrived."
55
"If anyone was talking about journalism in the '50s - it was Edward R.Murrow."
54
"I remember that during the period leading up to independence in Angola in 1975, I was the only correspondent there at all for three months."
54
"It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers, and when powerful abusers are taken on, there's always a bad reaction. So we see that controversy, and we believe that is a good thing to engage in."
53
"It took us about a day and a half to find out what had gone wrong."
53
"I remember when an editor at the National Geographic promised to run about a dozen of my landscape pictures from a story on the John Muir trail as an essay, but when the group of editors got together, someone said that my pictures looked like postcards."
53
"I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself."
53
"I think recent revelations about who's in what bed speak to the problems with what happened in the Gulf."
52
"Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable."
50
"I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate."
50
"The point is, the political reporters are the ones who no longer understand the ritual they are covering. They keep searching for political meanings in the tepid events when a convention is now essentially a human drama and only that."
50
"Journalism as theater is what TV news is."
50
"Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table."
49
"Nowadays I'm not even sure if newspapers take into account whether a person is a good writer."
49
"What passes for investigative journalism is finding somebody with their pants down - literally or otherwise."
48
"The central dilemma in journalism is that you don't know what you don't know."
47
"Obviously, if the commander makes certain decisions that the reporter thinks is inhibiting his right to report a legitimate story, he has to appeal to the commander's boss to get that changed."
47
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