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Journalism Quotes


"Before Truman Capote, journalism and non-fiction weren't taken very seriously."


"My own view, there is a need for and a demonstrated need for more journalism now than there ever has been."


"Before Truman, journalism and non-fiction weren't taken very seriously."


"Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism."


"And I believe that good journalism, good television, can make our world a better place."


"Journalism as theater is what TV news is."


"It's always been my formula to get the next picture set up before anyone's seen the last one."


"If an investigative reporter finds out that someone has been robbing the store, that may be "gotcha" journalism, but it's also good journalism."


"An investigation may take six months. A quick interview, profile, a day."


"Journalism constructs momentarily arrested equilibriums and gives disorder an implied order. That is already two steps from reality."


"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."


"We were right about the slush fund. But Sloan did not testify about it to the Grand Jury."


"In the end, Dan Rather's legend skewered him, CBS and the craft of journalism."


"If you're curious, you'll probably be a good journalist because we follow our curiosity like cats."


"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."


"Newspapers that are truly independent, like The Washington Post, can still aggressively investigate anyone or anything with no holds barred."


"Local television news, on both radio and television, is so appalling. Makes print journalism look like the greatest stuff ever written."


"Amin hid nothing. Everybody knew everything. Yet the American Senate only introduced a resolution breaking off trade with Amin three months before his overthrow."


"If anyone was talking about journalism in the '50s - it was Edward R.Murrow."


"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."


"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."


"For many years I was engaged in journalism, writing articles and chronicles for the daily press without ever joining the staff of any newspaper."


"The first rule of hurricane coverage is that every broadcast must begin with palm trees bending in the wind."


"In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right."


"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."


"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."


"The Nixon administration really put a lot of pressure on CBS not to run the second broadcast."


"Thirty years ago, in 1976, the notion of organized activity to combat discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity was an extremely controversial one."


"It's all quotes, anyway, and it all sounds the same to me."


"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."


"I started on the fringes of journalism as a cartoonist on The Daily Mail."


"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."


"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."



"The only school that let me in was U.C. Santa Cruz, which is where I went. They didn't have a journalism program, so I took sociology, which is the closest thing to journalism."


"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."


"Nowadays I'm not even sure if newspapers take into account whether a person is a good writer."


"It is grievous to read the papers in most respects, I agree. More and more I skim the headlines only, for one can be sure what is carried beneath them quite automatically, if one has long been a reader of the press journalism."



"Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable."


"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."


"Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you're at it."


"You're miserable, edgy and tired. You're in the perfect mood for journalism."


"I think recent revelations about who's in what bed speak to the problems with what happened in the Gulf."


"There is a long-standing tradition in the mainstream press of middle-of-the-road journalism that is objective and fair. I would hate to see that fall victim to a panic about the Fox effect."


"If you have an anecdote from one source, you file it away. If you hear it again, it may be true. Then the more times you hear it the less likely it is to be true."


"I never believed that Nixon could fully resurrect himself. And the proof of that was in the obits."


"I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it."
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