Quotes About Journalism By Journalists

#1. I am suspicious of writers who go looking for issues to address. Writers are neither preachers nor journalists. Journalists know much more than most writers about what's going on in the world. And if you want to change things, you do journalism.

A.S. Byatt

#2. No foundation that I am aware of has hired ex-journalists to promote a thoroughgoing inquiry.

Alexander Cockburn

#3. After the fall of the Soviet Union, if you start the clock, then 47 journalists, reporters, cameramen, photographers have been killed in Russia since the fall of communism. That makes it the third most deadly country on Earth to practice journalism. That's not a record to be proud of.

Daniel Silva

#4. In Washington journalists can afford to live almost as well as people who work for a living.

P. J. O'Rourke

#5. Let's be honest about journalists: We find a lot of ways of being wrong.

E.J. Dionne Jr.

#6. The competitive advantage professional journalism enjoys over the free is just that: professional journalists, whose paid positions give them the time and resources they need to commit more fully to the task. If we can't do better, so be it.

Douglas Rushkoff

#7. Journalists are in the same madly rocking boat as diplomats and statesmen. Like them, when the Cold War ended, they looked for a new world order and found a new world disorder. If making and conducting foreign policy in today's turbulent environment is difficult, so is practicing journalism.

Henry Grunwald

#8. I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.

Marguerite Duras

#9. Journalism is the only profession explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution, because journalists are supposed to be the check and balance on government. We're supposed to be holding those in power accountable. We're not supposed to be their megaphone. That's what the corporate media have become.

Amy Goodman

#10. No news is good news. No journalists is even better.

Nicolas Bentley

#11. Being a spectator of calamities taking place in an other country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half's worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists.

Sontag, Susan

#12. At least a circus performance does not last long, and the regime availing itself of the services of clownish journalists has the longevity of a mouldering mushroom.

Anna Politkovskaya

#13. Do you still think the world is vast? That if there is a conflagration in one place it does not have a bearing on another, and that you can sit it out in peace on your veranda admiring your absurd petunias?

Anna Politkovskaya

#14. Journalism should be more like science. As far as possible, facts should be verifiable. If journalists want long-term credibility for their profession, they have to go in that direction. Have more respect for readers.

Julian Assange

#15. I think that if there are problems in journalism they're created by journalists ... the trivialisation of the news and the sort of snyed, cynical allowance of untruth to be in a newspaper because it might be titillating.

Russell Crowe

#16. I have so much more compassion for journalists and the work that they have to do, in order to do the jobs that they have to do. I am much more in awe of and am celebratory of great journalism when I see it, and I'm much more critical of bad journalism, or crap masquerading as journalism.

Thomas Sadoski

#17. A paparazzi is merely an extremely nosy nobody with a camera - and bills to pay.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#18. The journalists in America are no longer covering critical stories. Investigative journalism is gone. Foreign-news coverage is gone. The press is owned by five giant corporations.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

#19. All journalists hope that their work will inspire a broader conversation. I think that's just what journalism is.

Sebastian Junger

#20. In almost all other professions a man must be able to observe carefully and report accurately what he has seen. Those qualifications are unnecessary for journalists, however, since their job is to write sensational stories that sell newspapers.

Robert Anton Wilson

#21. Moving forward, investigative journalists need to train themselves to be media amphibians - just as comfortable with the classic verities of great journalism as they are with video, Twitter, Facebook, and, most importantly, citizen journalism.

Arianna Huffington

#22. Ah well, to the journalist every country is rich.

Evelyn Waugh

#23. If you believe in journalism, you don't insult good journalists.

Sydney Schanberg

#24. What you read in the newspapers, hear on the radio and see on television, is hardly even the truth as seen by experts; it is the wishful thinking of journalists, seen through filters of prejudice and ignorance.

Hans Jurgen Eysenck

#25. The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.

Margaret Atwood

#26. Journalists should be watchdogs, not lapdogs.

Newton Lee

#27. I'm a member of the working press; you'd think I'd know better than to listen to journalists.

P. J. O'Rourke

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. [On journalists:] They are the scavengers of society who, possessing no guts of their own, tear out the guts of celebrities. They have the sycophantic, false enthusing gush of maiden aunts: who are accustomed to being trampled on doormats.

Caitlin Thomas

#32. And journalism itself has changed. News organizations and some journalists have transformed from their traditional role as watchdogs of power into institutions of power themselves with an ability, indeed, a susceptibility, to abuse that power.

Joan Konner

#33. I had pictured journalism as I'd seen it in the most ennobling films, where the reporter battles for the truth, propelled by conviction, and is triumphant. There are journalists who fit that ideal.

Tom Rachman

#34. Freedom of the press is not questioned when investigative journalism unearths scandals, But that does not mean that every classified state document should be made available to journalists.

Otto Schily

#35. Computer hackers are the true journalists in the 21st Century. The old journalism is worse than dead. It is unreliable to the point that it is nothing more than a nuisance, an obstacle in the pursuit of truth.

A.E. Samaan

#36. 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

#37. The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They, indeed, are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#38. Nobody beats a bunch of journalists for inflating their rather mundane straightforward chores with a lot more melodrama and self-importance than the job should be asked to contain.

Larry King

#39. As touchy as cabaret performers and as stubborn as factory machinists ...

Tom Rachman

#40. 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

#41. This seems charmingly paradoxical: scientists seek one truth but often voice many opinions; journalists often speak of many truths while voicing a uniform view.

Christopher Essex

#42. I assume that - because you can get degrees in journalism from very reputable universities - I assume that people can be trained to be journalists. I've never been entirely certain that anyone can be trained to be a novelist in the same way.

William Gibson

#43. They had holes to fill on every page and jammed in any vaguely newsworthy string of words provided it didn't include expletives, which they were apparently saving for their own use around the office.

Tom Rachman

#44. 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

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

Rebecca Aguilar

#46. Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from peoples heads

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#47. Perhaps the biggest problem in journalism is the cult divide between journalists and corporate owners.

Ken Auletta

#48. When journalists are 'accused' of being 'advocates', that means: challenging and deviating from DC orthodoxies.

Glenn Greenwald