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Journalism Quotes
"Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table."
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"I think recent revelations about who's in what bed speak to the problems with what happened in the Gulf."
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"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."
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"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."
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"What passes for investigative journalism is finding somebody with their pants down - literally or otherwise."
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"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."
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"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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"The central dilemma in journalism is that you don't know what you don't know."
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"As electronic journalism came to be evaluated for its cost effectiveness, the network world began breaking up."
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"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."
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"You shouldn't presume that all quotes that are in a magazine or a newspaper are accurate."
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"I didn't like the competitiveness of big-time journalism."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"And the irony is that they wrote better without access to my quotes."
17
"Writers are the lunatic fringe of publishing."
17
"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."
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"Editing is the same as quarrelling with writers - same thing exactly."
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"It's all storytelling, you know. That's what journalism is all about."
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"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."
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"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."
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"I know that doesn't sound very radical and webby of me to say that but I think the New York Times is important. I also think there's an occasional piece that will pop out."
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"Stanford had no journalism program so I just learned by doing, effectively."
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"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."
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"In America journalism is apt to be regarded as an extension of history: in Britain, as an extension of conversation."
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"Newspapermen ask dumb questions. They look up at the sun and ask if it is shining."
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"It took us about a day and a half to find out what had gone wrong."
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"To pick up the paper and read about yourself getting slammed, that doesn't start your day off right."
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"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."
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"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."
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"The first essence of journalism is to know what you want to know, the second, is to find out who will tell you."
14
"I always felt more emotionally attached to Cambodia than I did to Vietnam."
14
"Fantasy should be as close as possible to journalism."
14
"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."
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"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."
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"The Congressional leaders set the agenda for journalism; it's not the other way around."
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"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."
13
"What appears in newspapers is often new but seldom true."
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"I've been with the paper for almost 30 years."
13
"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."
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"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."
12
"Murrow covered something because it needed coverage. He wasn't trying to get an audience just for the sake of it."
12
"I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate."
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"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."
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"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."
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"I've learned in my years as a journalist that when a politician says 'That's ridiculous' you're probably on the right track."
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