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Journalism Quotes
"The central dilemma in journalism is that you don't know what you don't know."
12
"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."
12
"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."
12
"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."
12
"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."
12
"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."
11
"Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table."
11
"All the libel lawyers will tell you there's no libel any more, that everyone's given up."
11
"I think recent revelations about who's in what bed speak to the problems with what happened in the Gulf."
11
"You shouldn't presume that all quotes that are in a magazine or a newspaper are accurate."
11
"Where journalists have gotten themselves in trouble over the last few decades is that their skepticism often extends only to American officials, the U.S. military and Republican politicians."
11
"Sure, some journalists use anonymous sources just because they're lazy and I think editors ought to insist on more precise identification even if they remain anonymous."
11
"The first essence of journalism is to know what you want to know, the second, is to find out who will tell you."
10
"I started on the fringes of journalism as a cartoonist on The Daily Mail."
10
"Newspapermen ask dumb questions. They look up at the sun and ask if it is shining."
10
"It took us about a day and a half to find out what had gone wrong."
10
"Stanford had no journalism program so I just learned by doing, effectively."
10
"To pick up the paper and read about yourself getting slammed, that doesn't start your day off right."
10
"If we're going to live as we are in a world of supply and demand, then journalists had better find a way to create a demand for good journalism."
10
"Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you're at it."
10
"What passes for investigative journalism is finding somebody with their pants down - literally or otherwise."
10
"It's all storytelling, you know. That's what journalism is all about."
10
"I finally had to go to the American Civil Liberties Union here in northern California to get my reply published to what I considered to be a hatchet job done by Stanley Crouch."
10
"What we have to do is put this in a coherent form for them at the end of the day, and on the big events, give them the kind of context that they deserve."
10
"And the irony is that they wrote better without access to my quotes."
9
"The markets where we've got real good presence are the older, more mature markets like Australia, and Western Europe - where we've only got 6,000 stores, compared to the US with 13,000."
9
"I don't think Fox News or Rush Limbaugh need Clinton it turns out. I think there's a hunger out there for - whether it's on the left or right - a more lively and provocative type of political journalism. I think Salon and Fox on the other side have both benefited from that."
9
"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."
9
"What appears in newspapers is often new but seldom true."
9
"I came over here and worked for rock magazines, and I worked for Rolling Stone, which has a very high standard of journalism, a very good research department."
9
"Editing is the same as quarrelling with writers - same thing exactly."
9
"In America journalism is apt to be regarded as an extension of history: in Britain, as an extension of conversation."
9
"I never believed that Nixon could fully resurrect himself. And the proof of that was in the obits."
9
"I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate."
8
"I always felt more emotionally attached to Cambodia than I did to Vietnam."
8
"Fantasy should be as close as possible to journalism."
8
"The Washington Times wrote a story questioning the authenticity of some of the suggestions made about me in Silent Coup. But as a believer in the First Amendment, I believe they have more than a right to air their views."
8
"As somebody who's been writing about this subject for getting on twenty years now, it's astonishing how the climate has changed in the last five years."
8
"You find the most important thing that really grabs you, and put it right up top. Don't bury the lead. Put it at the top. Best thing to do. Never go wrong that way. It's an immutable law of journalism. It just always works."
8
"I've been with the paper for almost 30 years."
8
"The First Amendment does not guarantee the press a constitutional right of special access to information not available to the general public, nor does it cloak the inmate with special rights of freedom of speech."
8
"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."
7
"I've learned in my years as a journalist that when a politician says 'That's ridiculous' you're probably on the right track."
7
"Murrow covered something because it needed coverage. He wasn't trying to get an audience just for the sake of it."
7
"Journalism was looked upon as a more noble thing than it is now. I don't know if it carries the same cachet that it did then."
7
"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."
6
"Professionally, I remember Cronkite as a kid growing up, and more so for me, the importance of Cronkite was not him sitting there at the anchor desk, but him out there doing things."
6
"While I'm critical to the Bush presidency, it's been enormously beneficial for Salon because we're seen as kind of an aggressive watchdog on the Bush White House. Particularly since Florida, our readership hit a whole new level, and we held onto those readers."
6
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