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Journalism Quotes
"Before Truman Capote, journalism and non-fiction weren't taken very seriously."
58
"Before Truman, journalism and non-fiction weren't taken very seriously."
50
"Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism."
23
"And I believe that good journalism, good television, can make our world a better place."
18
"An investigation may take six months. A quick interview, profile, a day."
18
"Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable."
12
"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."
12
"Newspapers that are truly independent, like The Washington Post, can still aggressively investigate anyone or anything with no holds barred."
12
"In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right."
11
"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."
11
"If you're curious, you'll probably be a good journalist because we follow our curiosity like cats."
10
"For many years I was engaged in journalism, writing articles and chronicles for the daily press without ever joining the staff of any newspaper."
10
"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."
10
"The first rule of hurricane coverage is that every broadcast must begin with palm trees bending in the wind."
9
"Amin hid nothing. Everybody knew everything. Yet the American Senate only introduced a resolution breaking off trade with Amin three months before his overthrow."
9
"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."
9
"Journalism as theater is what TV news is."
9
"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."
9
"We were right about the slush fund. But Sloan did not testify about it to the Grand Jury."
9
"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."
9
"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."
8
"In the end, Dan Rather's legend skewered him, CBS and the craft of journalism."
8
"As electronic journalism came to be evaluated for its cost effectiveness, the network world began breaking up."
8
"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."
8
"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."
8
"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."
8
"I was sent there by the Free Congress Committee, headed by Paul Weyrich. Fred Smith and I were sent down as observers, with reporters' credentials, so we could witness the events."
8
"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."
8
"It's always been my formula to get the next picture set up before anyone's seen the last one."
8
"A journalist's job is to collect information," Ovid said to Pete. "Nope," Pete said. "That's what we do. It's not what they do." Dellarobia was unready to be pushed out of the conversation just like that. "Then what do you think the news people drive their Jeeps all the way out here for?" "To shore up the prevailing view of their audience and sponsors." "Pete takes a dim view of his fellow humans," Ovid said. "He prefers insects. Dellarobia turned her chair halfway around to face Pete, scraping noisily against the cement floor. "You're saying people only tune in to news they know they're going to agree with?" "Bingo," said Pete."
8
"I began to realise that film sees the world differently than the human eye, and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed."
8
"You're miserable, edgy and tired. You're in the perfect mood for journalism."
8
"The Nixon administration really put a lot of pressure on CBS not to run the second broadcast."
8
"Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table."
7
"The central dilemma in journalism is that you don't know what you don't know."
7
"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."
7
"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."
7
"The really tough thing would have been to decide to take Woodward and Bernstein off the story. They were carrying the coal for us - in that their stories were right."
7
"If an investigative reporter finds out that someone has been robbing the store, that may be "gotcha" journalism, but it's also good journalism."
7
"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."
7
"Honestly, I expected to get a cold reception because of my subject matter. But when editors took a look at the story I had to tell, and saw that this was not a parochial story at all, they really warmed to it."
7
"It's all quotes, anyway, and it all sounds the same to me."
7
"If anyone was talking about journalism in the '50s - it was Edward R.Murrow."
7
"I didn't like the competitiveness of big-time journalism."
7
"In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat."
7
"Nowadays I'm not even sure if newspapers take into account whether a person is a good writer."
7
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