Journalism's Quotes

#1. I said in 2008 the media is dead in America. Journalism's dead.

Sean Hannity

#2. Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.

George Packer

#3. American journalism's crazy old aunt in the attic.

Helen Thomas

#4. Journalism's ultimate purpose is to inform the reader, to bring him each day a letter from home and never to permit the serving of special interests.

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger

#5. There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism's problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance.

Russell Baker

#6. Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism
which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place.

Hunter S. Thompson

#7. As much as the Pulitzer is the hallmark of journalism, I think what I love the most is when somebody says they took my column and it's in their wallet. I have had people open their wallet and show me a corner of a column.

Regina Brett

#8. In many ways, Tucker Carlson's a better symbol of the pathetic state of what passes for conservative journalism than even Glenn Beck or the late Andrew Breitbart, to name two of his contemporaries with a much larger following.

Alex Pareene

#9. [I am enthusiastic about journalism because] it's a craft that can ... galvanize an often complacent citizenry, and make a difference.

Katie Couric

#10. Writing one's first novel, getting it sold, and shepherding it through the labyrinths of editing, production, marketing, journalism, and social media is an arduous and nerve-wracking process.

Paul Di Filippo

#11. I can only speak as an American, but most journalism here isn't doing its job any more. It's about selling stuff.

Lance Reddick

#12. It's the great flaw of journalism. The more something happens, the less newsworthy it is.

Nathan Hill

#13. People who use dirty methods to hurt others ... will be destroyed with methods that are even dirtier than theirs!! That's what I call justice!! Not to mention ... journalism! - Wolfgangina Lalla Getto

Tite Kubo

#14. If you've done a bit of journalism, everyone assumes you must be moving into PR. We're absolutely not becoming a PR agency and we're not turning into Brunswick. We will remain SRU, but we will be owned by the Brunswick Group. It's quite different.

Peter York

#15. It's true that journalism in reality is not the journalism that we learnt in the university. It is far from it.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

#16. Whether it's long-form journalism or investigative journalism, it's no fun to just be the guy diagnosing the problem.

Clay Shirky

#17. The Guardian's 'Word of Mouth' blog bridges the gap between blogging and serious food journalism.

Yotam Ottolenghi

#18. Frighteningly honest. What Anthony Bourdain did to the world of cooking in Kitchen Confidential, Leopold will do to the world of journalism. It's Sid & Nancy meets All the President's Men.

Rob Cohen

#19. Good journalism is crucial. Good journalism isn't easy so I think it's less about what story and more about the layers and context that need to be explored in the story. That's one of the reasons why I'm excited to be a part of CNN. This is the kind of place that you can do that.

George Stroumboulopoulos

#20. I can't think in terms of journalism without thinking in terms of political ends. Unless there's been a reaction, there's been no journalism. It's cause and effect.

Hunter S. Thompson

#21. Stories, as we're taught in journalism school early on, are told through people. Those stories make our documentaries powerful. You can explore someone's culture, you can explore their experience, you can explore an issue through human beings who are going through it.

Soledad O'Brien

#22. In early 1970, Newsweek's editors decided that the new women's liberation movement deserved a cover story. There was one problem, however: there were no women to write the piece.

Lynn Povich

#23. I think if there's some kind of crisis in news journalism ... a crisis of credibility, then it's been created by journalists. I'm empathetic, I understand it and I see it, but I'm not sympathetic about it. If you want people to think of journalism with higher regard then do better work.

Russell Crowe

#24. All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings.

Denis Diderot

#25. [O]nce demagogy and falsehoods become routine, there isn't much for the political journalist to do except handicap the race and report on the candidate's mood.

George Packer

#26. (Feedback) People become addicted to it. That's why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.

Zadie Smith

#27. Needless, heedless, wanton and deliberate injury of the sort inflicted by Life's picture story is not an essential instrument of responsible journalism.

Abe Fortas

#28. Think of it: television producers joining with newspapers to tell stories. It's journalism of the future. Advertising will follow the crowd - the 'crowd' being viewers and readers, of course, which could bring revenue back into journalism.

Bill Kurtis

#29. The prose," Robespierre said. "It's so clean, no conceits, no show, no wit. He means every word. Formerly, you see, he meant every other word. That was his style.

Hilary Mantel

#30. There's not a better job in journalism than the one we have, seriously on '60 Minutes' - not a better job.

Mike Wallace

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

Tina Brown

#32. Our stable and eternal verities are being challenged. There's a kind of postmodern breakdown in journalism. The breadth of information sources and the speed of transmission are growing; but the traditional gravity of news has eroded. -Jin Yongquan

Judy Polumbaum

#33. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and "the public's right to know"; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

Janet Malcolm

#34. Concussions is one of these pack journalism issues, frankly. There's no increase in concussions. The number is relatively small. The problem is, it is a journalist issue.

Paul Tagliabue

#35. This much we know: Journalism is not a precise science. It's, on its best day, is a crude art. We make mistakes; I make mistakes. With more than 50 years as a journalist, I have at least had the opportunity to blow more stories, make more mistakes than maybe anybody in television.

Dan Rather

#36. Science doesn't care, by and large, what the answers are. It's only interested in getting the right answer. And journalism should be very much that way.

Scott Pelley

#37. Journalism is not just a cause, it's also a wacky profession.

David Talbot

#38. Anyone that is able to put a high school film and gonzo journalism together, it's like, "Yes, please!"

Zoe Kravitz

#39. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

Hunter S. Thompson

#40. It's perfectly possible for somebody to make the transition from politics to journalism.

Brit Hume

#41. Obviously, in journalism, you're confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it's in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one.

Amy Hempel

#42. With a camera, a microphone, and sufficient cash, you, too, can craft your own version of the world and emblazon it with a premium of fear over facts. (Be warned though: Paranoid schizophrenia makes for compelling film, but it's no way of life.)

David T. Hardy

#43. But journalists thrive on not knowing exactly what the future holds. That's part of the excitement. Something interesting, something important, will happen somewhere, as sure as God made sour apples, and a good aggressive newspaper will become part of that something.

Ben Bradlee

#44. Internet journalism is not a world we know very well at all. It's conducted more on the screen and less in bars, which makes it rather less useful for getting stories about people throwing up over one another, which is what one's after.

Ian Hislop

#45. I read Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Reader's Digest ... I read some responsible journalism, and from that, I form my own opinions. I also happen to be intelligent, and I question everything.

Gary Coleman

#46. It's very hard in our adversarial society to find a third view. Take journalism, where everything is always presented as one person against another: "Now we're going to hear the opposing view." There is never a third view.

James Hillman

#47. We don't consider ourselves equal opportunity anythings, because that's not - you know, that's the beauty of fake journalism. We don't have to - we travel in fake ethics.

Jon Stewart

#48. My master's degree was in journalism, but everything important I ever learned about being a journalist I learned on the job.

Rebecca Mead

#49. The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.

Hunter S. Thompson

#50. More people pay attention to fiction and to narrative than pay attention to journalism. That's quite sad. More people pay attention to television than to prose. That's equally sad, if not more so.

David Simon

#51. Journalism is a craft that takes years to learn. It's like golf. You never get it right all the time. It's a game of fewer errors, better facts, and better reporting.

Ben Huh

#52. That became the signature Ice-T style - rhymes that were "topical" and "vividly optical." To me it was street-level journalism, real-life observations told in poetry. That's the vision I tried to bring to all my recordings.

Ice-T

#53. Journalism, some huge percentage of it, should be devoted to putting pressure on power, on nonsense, on chicanery of all kinds and if that's going to invite a lawsuit, well, bring it on.

David Remnick

#54. What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject's blind self absorption and the journalist's skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.

Janet Malcolm

#55. As a journalist, I've always treaded carefully about being Jewish and caring a lot about Israel and having that not become too big of an issue that could affect my journalism. But I also don't think it's essential to my Judaism, as I think it might be for some other people.

David Gregory

#56. What's the easiest fucking thing to take?" I asked him. "Journalism. Those journalism majors don't do anything." "O.K., I'll be a journalist.

Charles Bukowski

#57. Tip to all British tabloids: Do Not Hack Amy Winehouse's Phone. I repeat: Do Not Hack Amy Winehouse's Phone.

Jonah Goldberg

#58. I work in comedy, journalism, media, and technology, many of which don't have a lot of black faces in visible positions. I walk through Brooklyn with a surfboard. It's fun to challenge and expand people's expectations.

Baratunde Thurston

#59. There's a long-standing debate in the media biz over whether the news outlets should give the public what it wants, or what it needs. This debate presupposes that media execs actually know what it wants or needs. And that there actually is a unitary "public.

Brooke Gladstone

#60. One of the great pressures we're facing in journalism now is it's a lot cheaper to hire thumb suckers and pundits and have talk shows on the air than actually have bureaus and reporters.

Walter Isaacson

#61. Journalism is being pushed into a space where I don't think it should ever go, where it's trying to support the monetization model of the Web by driving page views. So what you have is a drop-off of long-form journalism, because long-form pieces are harder to monetize.

Mike McCue

#62. I find there's a thin, permeable membrane between journalism and history, and though some academic historians take a dim view of it, I gather a lot of strength and professional inspiration from passing back and forth across it.

Hampton Sides

#63. PR is a mix of journalism, psychology, and lawyering - it's an ever-changing and always interesting landscape.

Ronn Torossian

#64. An exciting and yet highly lucid account of the formation and significance of Karl Kraus's modernist journalism, an activity that Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem regarded as the most Jewish writing in the German language. The Anti-Journalist is the best book I have seen on this engaging topic.

Istvan Deak

#65. Their culture is narrowly interbred, and some personal relations border on the incestuous, so they float each other's boat and write almost identical muck-raking stories. Everyone in China knows why they are, and their China-bashing is green-lighting all of us to join the onslaught.

Thorsten J. Pattberg

#66. The speaker was stringy and angular, his blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, his plaid workman's shirtsleeves rolled up around his pale biceps. Journalism major, I guessed.

Jonathan Lethem

#67. It's important to remember that the future of quality journalism is not dependent on the future of newspapers. The discussion needs to move from "How do we save newspapers?" to "How do we save and strengthen journalism?" - however it is delivered.

Arianna Huffington

#68. What sells, today, is whatever Fucks You Up - whatever short-circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time.

Hunter S. Thompson

#69. Journalism is about results. It's about affecting your community or your society in the most progressive way.

Anas Aremeyaw Anas

#70. What journalism is really about-it's to monitor power and the centres of power.

Amira Hass

#71. Journalism has changed tremendously because of the democratization of information. Anybody can put something up on the Internet. It's harder and harder to find what the truth is.

Robert Redford

#72. I think there's always satisfaction that comes from digging in and telling a story and being on the front line and writing about it. I think there's a venue available if you look. Even print journalism is in good shape in areas.

Cameron Crowe

#73. Journalists aren't supposed to praise things. It's a violation of work rules almost as serious as buying drinks with our own money or absolving the CIA of something.

P. J. O'Rourke

#74. It's great being a journalist, because our office is the world.

Rebecca Aguilar

#75. Objectivity, in this sense, means that a person's statements about the world can be trusted if they are submitted to established rules deemed legitimate by a professional community. Facts here are not aspects of the world, but consensually validated statements about it.

Michael Schudson

#76. Until he (Time's founder Henry Luce) arrived, news was crime and politics.

David Halberstam

#77. Fiction just has a lot more room for ambivalence and internal conflict, contradiction, and for me that sums up so much of what people felt after 9/11 - confusion even. And I think that's hard to capture in journalism.

Amy Waldman

#78. So this guy, Jeff Johnson, who is an accountant who cares nothing at all about a free press and cares nothing about journalism, he's a right winger who supported the war, you know, who two years ago told people he couldn't stand a word that I wrote.

Robert Scheer

#79. Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporter's gallery yonder, there sat a fourth estate more important far than they all.

Thomas Carlyle

#80. Journalism is the protection between people and any sort of totalitarian rule. That's why my hero, admittedly a flawed one, is a journalist.

Andrew Vachss

#81. Never miss it - that's the second biggest compliment I'd give to RealClearPolitics. The first is that it has become indispensable to anyone, in or outside of journalism, who's interested in politics, policy, or world affairs.

Fred Barnes

#82. We have bigger things to brood on and enormous reasons for wallowing in terminal craziness until we finally hit bottom.

Hunter S. Thompson

#83. I'm sure it's all journalism [ ... ] It means it's true enough for now.

Terry Pratchett

#84. Conventional wisdom in Galbraith's view must be simple, convenient, comfortable and comforting - though not necessarily true.

Steven D. Levitt

#85. Even the two novels I've written were based on true stories. It's how I'm wired - real life is fascinating and fantastical enough. The kind of journalism I did unpeeled lids from cans otherwise sealed.

Peter Landesman

#86. I was raised by a formidable woman. She always pushed me to be competitive in a man's world. That's maybe one of the attractions to journalism in the beginning. It was a male profession, and I was comfortable in that.

Maria Shriver

#87. As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife's money and little bits I was picking up for journalism.

Jonathan Coe

#88. He never asked me what I thought, and I never told him what I thought, because in my view that's the way a journalist ought to behave. You ought not to be going around to people volunteering your feelings. That's daily journalism.

Janet Malcolm

#89. 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.

Kurt Loder

#90. There's no worse crime in journalism these days than simply deciding something's a story because Drudge links to it.

Chuck Todd

#91. I often attribute my screenwriting to journalism because they drill in the who, what, when, where and why - but we really need to land on that why. That's what I've been exploring in my writing for many years and trying to get better at.

Mara Brock Akil

#92. The one thing I didn't do that was kind of controversial was go work for a daily paper, because I didn't like that kind of journalism, and I'm glad I didn't because that's the business model that's going totally extinct.

Sarah Lacy

#93. There's a certain elitism that has crept into the attitudes of some in journalism, and it played out perfectly over the issue of these little American flag lapel pins.

Brit Hume

#94. It had occurred to her that the ultimate expression of Tom Wolfe's 'saturation reporting' was possibly at hand: the copycat murder of the journalist, with the murderer finishing the piece and filing it, complete with photographs and videos.

David Cronenberg

#95. I've still got lots of writing in me. I have not left journalism, but I put it on hold to focus on acting. I love actors. I think it's a crazy thing to do with your life, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for them.

Liane Balaban

#96. More and more, journalism seems to have hopped out of Truth's pocket and crept into another.

Henry Rollins

#97. I hope to keep writing journalism as long as I write fiction; it's afforded me such amazing adventures and opportunities. It does take a lot of time, so it's hard to do both at once, but I try to do a big journalism piece every couple of years, and I'll hopefully continue with that.

Jennifer Egan

#98. My job is to lay it out clearly, not to give my policy prescriptions.Very little journalism is world changing. But if change is to happen, it will be because people with power have a better sense of what's happening to people who have none.

Katherine Boo

#99. Look at the news stand, you know? I mean, it's a cacophony of famous people or people who want to be famous with blurbs all around it, and it's supposed to be, you know, that's supposed to be creativity in journalism. My God, it's unbelievable. It's shocking.

George Lois

#100. I don't really like the way that journalism works in the UK anyway; it's all about getting the most shocking thing out of somebody and kind of twisting people's words, which isn't really journalism, as far as I'm concerned.

Lily Allen