Quotes About Journalists

#1. So much of what I say gets sensationalized and journalists have to report on scandal because that's what people are hungry to read about.

Megan Fox

#2. There is a long tradition in China for writers and journalists to take pen names, partly as protection from retaliation by authorities. If Facebook requires the use of real names, that could potentially put Chinese citizens in danger.

Michael Anti

#3. It's extremely difficult to describe interestingly what happens on the pitch. Thousands of journalists write millions of words every week trying to do it, so your chances of avoiding cliche are very slim. And you're trying to write fiction, not a match report.

Mal Peet

#4. Music journalists are some of the lazy, most uninspired, dull people I've ever met.

Zachary Cole Smith

#5. Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

Arnold Bennett

#6. I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity of motive), I am absolved of responsibility. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry.

P. J. O'Rourke

#7. No, there are no hard and fast rules about sources, no printed booklet to help journalists through.

Ian Hislop

#8. There is unspeakable yet entirely preventable suffering in this world. The job of journalists and writers engaged with global issues is to articulate the unspeakable and give voice to solutions.
K. Lee Lerner

K. Lee Lerner

#9. I'm sort of planting Post-It notes all over my psyche. Do not skateboard wasted. Do not buy $10,000 rugs. Be careful what you say to journalists. You don't have to stay up until 7 A.M. - tomorrow is a new day.

Ryan Adams

#10. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scutter.

P. J. O'Rourke

#11. 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

#12. Most political journalists come to Washington because they're snappy writers, big thinkers, or news breakers. Me? My ticket to the big leagues had little to do with talent. It was mostly about the governor I was covering, Bill Clinton.

Ron Fournier

#13. I'm really bad at describing my books. Journalists like to have things like "It's The Terminator Meets the Seven Dwarfs." And I can't do that with my books. If I could, I probably wouldn't write them.

Charles De Lint

#14. I've had journalists beg me to please say something negative about my estate.

Freema Agyeman

#15. He has been named as the heir apparent of the great Argentine hero, Diego Maradona, by journalists, players, and Maradona himself, alike. I'd personally put him in a drawer of my bedside table.

Franz Beckenbauer

#16. In so many countries, Western journalists are viewed simply as dollar signs. We're ransom objects.

Lynsey Addario

#17. You know it's easy here to buy journalists.

Emile Lahoud

#18. I think as journalists, we have to keep our distance from power.

Jorge Ramos

#19. I think it's my interaction with journalists that has pegged me more as political than my actual records, although they have obviously political aspects to them as well.

Serj Tankian

#20. For some people it's real therapy to talk to journalists about their private lives and inner thoughts. But I would rather keep something to myself.

Mick Jagger

#21. Journalists are quite surprised outside their dinner parties when they hear where I live. 'Van Nuys? You still live there?' It is like saying you're from Alabama.

Sandra Tsing Loh

#22. Journalists should be watchdogs, not lapdogs.

Newton Lee

#23. We have increasingly fewer and fewer journalists who have any military experience and understand what life is like in the military and in combat.

Jim Lehrer

#24. Leopold, one of the reporters who broke the Enron story, is now breaking his own story: how he got addicted to cocaine, committed grand theft, cleaned himself up and found happiness as a 'news junkie.' This scrappy memoir ... might become required reading for aspiring journalists.

Publishers Weekly

#25. My experience with journalists authorize me to record that a very large number of them are ignorant, lazy, opinionated, intellectually dishonest, and inadequately supervised.... They have huge power, and many of them are extremely reckless.

Conrad Black

#26. We've never had a situation where mass media has been so censored, at least in my lifetime. When I was younger, networks like NBC, CBS, were independently owned, and took their jobs as journalists seriously. There used to be documentaries like "The Selling of the Pentagon."

Jello Biafra

#27. The dedication of Don Winslow's novel 'The Cartel' is nearly two pages long: a list of journalists who were either murdered or 'disappeared' in Mexico between 2004 and 2012 - the period covered in this hugely hypnotic new thriller.

Alan Cheuse

#28. Not only do journalists not have a responsibility to report what skeptical scientists have to say about global warming. They have a responsibility not to report what these scientists say.

Ross Gelbspan

#29. My belief is that 'recluse' is a code word generated by journalists ... meaning, doesn't like to talk to reporters ...

Thomas Pynchon

#30. Journalists say my music is "blue wave," or "dreamy," or "jangly-slacker jewel," and none of it really makes sense to me.

Mac DeMarco

#31. Most people are not shocked that I am occasionally rude to journalists. They are probably amazed I don't punch one in the face.

Ken Livingstone

#32. In a film muddied by fictional detail, the new Spielberg production 'Fifth Estate's portrayal of the 'Guardian's work with Wikileaks is accurate in describing the running dispute between journalists who wanted to redact documents to make them safe and Julian Assange, who wanted no such restraint.

Nick Davies

#33. I can think of few things more painful than naming four good things about yourself in front of a room of journalists!

Anne Hathaway

#34. It is not astonishing that there are many journalists who have become human failures and worthless men. Rather, it is astonishing that, despite all this, this very stratum includes such a great number of valuable and quite genuine men, a fact that outsiders would not so easily guess.

Max Weber

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

P. J. O'Rourke

#36. It shouldn't take extreme courage and a willingness to go to prison for decades or even life to blow the whistle on bad government acts done in secret. But it does. And that is an immense problem for democracy, one that all journalists should be united in fighting.

Glenn Greenwald

#37. The truth is, I don't have any problem with journalists - I count some of them as friends - also some of my heroes are journalists, I'm a big fan of Robert Fisk - great people or crazy people who are prepared to stand up for what's right.

Daniel Craig

#38. 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

#39. I think people can learn from my experience - you know, any young people who are under pressure, whether you work on Wall Street or you work in a factory in Alabama, and young journalists.

Jayson Blair

#40. You who are journalists, writers, citizens, you have the right and duty to say to those you have elected that they must practice mindfulness, calm and deep listening, and loving speech. This is universal thing, taught by all religions.

Nhat Hanh

#41. The business of funding digging journalists is important to encourage. It cannot be replaced by bloggers who don't have access to politicians, who don't have easy access to official documents, who aren't able to buttonhole people in power.

Andrew Marr

#42. The thing is with the media, I have a love-hate relationship with [it]. [Journalists] are only doing their jobs and you can't get your own way all the time.

Michelle Mone

#43. Milton stood among his staff, shaking hands, memorising names. He already knew them in a way - he understood this breed backward and had foreseeen how his speech would be received. Journalists were as touchy as Cabernet performers and as stubborn as factory machinists. He couldn't help smiling.

Tom Rachman

#44. And as journalists we look for differences - differences between countries, cultures, classes, and communities. We're very sensitized to difference, but it's much harder to write about similarities across countries, cultures, classes, and communities.

Amy Waldman

#45. Capote, of course, addressed very similar themes to Good Night and Good Luck. Both films are about determined journalists defying obstacles in a relentless pursuit of the truth. Needless to say, both are period pieces.

Jon Stewart

#46. We have to protect all journalists, and journalists have to be allowed to do their jobs.

Amy Goodman

#47. You journalists bulldoze life's mysteries, ignorant of what you're so ruthlessly turning up.

Marisha Pessl

#48. The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout with publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one's writing, however, is nil - otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.

John Banville

#49. Journalists have made celebrities into an industry.

Stefanie Powers

#50. Once journalists have been rifling through your dustbins, you do try and keep them at arms' length.

Craig Charles

#51. The journalists are poking me all the time. It's impossible for me to stop even I want to.

Yao Ming

#52. The fact is that in a way, journalists become a kind of default in the system when you don't have substantive two-party back-and-forth inside of the government.

Ron Suskind

#53. David Carr was one of the most gifted journalists who has ever worked at The New York Times,

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger

#54. I do not know why journalists insist on calling their stuff "pieces", when they are in fact little entities, attempting to have beginnings, middles and endings.

James Cameron

#55. I think journalists have the right to their opinions but I think their opinions should be based on history and what they see, not what they feel, how long they've been waiting or whether it's raining or it's snowing or whatever.

Marc Jacobs

#56. I was originally going to train as a journalist, passing a series of exams that winnowed ten thousand applicants down to one hundred places on a National Union of Journalists course.

Warren Ellis

#57. I think it's a problem when journalists have the title of their article before they do the interview, because it biases the way they conduct it.

Michel Gondry

#58. I don't think there is one size that fits all [] I've been to too many meetings with journalists who spent the first 10 minutes of the meeting setting up iPad to look like a laptop.

Steve Ballmer

#59. There are journalists who are drawn to the most extroverted, aggressive jobs because they get an ego high from it. It can be shocking to encounter them and even worse to work with them.

Tom Rachman

#60. Journalists often ask me when I go to the field, 'What do you expect to find?' And my answer always is, 'The unexpected,' because we're just looking at the tip of the iceberg; we've just scratched the surface.

Donald Johanson

#61. The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play.

Oswald Spengler

#62. Being an artist, it's always tempting to measure success through other people's eyes, be they critics, journalists or audiences.

Sara Blecher

#63. At such times as that, when the TV cameras begin creeping up on a mother weeping at her son's coffin, journalists should wonder where the profession is heading.

Don Davis

#64. I give this book 5 Stars and highly recommend it to all fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writers, aspiring writers, bloggers or journalists.

Sunny

#65. I hope that many visual journalists will be hired or funded along the way as well - we urgently need their perspectives.

Fred Ritchin

#66. I don't think enough journalists read enough - literature, history. You've got to keep reading all through your career.

Pete Hamill

#67. 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

#68. Within the narrow confines of Permanent Washington - the journalists, lobbyists, and congressional lifers who are the city's avatars of centrism and continuity - Ford is considered the beau ideal of American leadership.

Timothy Noah

#69. 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

#70. [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

#71. They had become unofficial mentors to the two aspiring teenage journalists,

John Feinstein

#72. Journalists were killed because they defended freedom. Policemen were killed because they were protecting you. Jews were killed because they were Jewish.

Manuel Valls

#73. We are all Julian Assange. Serious reporters discuss classified information every day - go to any Washington or New York dinner party where real journalists are present, and you will hear discussion of leaked or classified information. That is journalists' job in a free society.

Naomi Wolf

#74. Lawyers tend to be bright people. They tend to be-much more than many journalists I've encountered-sticklers for detail and accuracy, and they have a logical way of arguing.

Ann Coulter

#75. There are honest journalists like there are honest politicians - they stay bought.

Bill Moyers

#76. Rich, famous, insider journalists do not want to subvert the status quo that so lavishly rewards them. Like all courtiers, they are eager to defend the system that vests them with their privileges and contemptuous of anyone who challenges that system.

Glenn Greenwald

#77. I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness.
They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.

W.B.Yeats

#78. 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

#79. Journalists immediately think of me as a resource for a quote or comment because they know that I will be available to offer fresh insight and meet their deadlines.

Marc Benioff

#80. The fat Russian agent was cornering all the foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an Anarchist plot. I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies - unless one counts journalists.

George Orwell

#81. Every poll shows that most journalists are Democrats.

Sally Quinn

#82. A group photo of the top ten journalists in America on any given day would be a monument to human ugliness.

Hunter S. Thompson

#83. But it's more an up-versus-down issue because the research has shown that opinion leaders, whether they're elected officials, journalists, business leaders - it's academics, religious leaders - they have dramatically different views on immigration. A

Mark Krikorian

#84. Journalists say that when a dog bites a man, that is not news, but when a man bites a dog, that is news ... Thanks to the mathematics of combinatorics, we will never run out of news.

Steven Pinker

#85. The most important responsibility we have as journalists is to question those who are in power. I honestly believe that.

Jorge Ramos

#86. Even after the Rosenthal column, nobody responsible in the Republican Party said, 'Yes, Pat Buchanan is an anti-Semite.' They didn't join in. Very few journalists joined in. What happened was, when he entered the presidential politics, then he entered a new level of criticism and attack on him.

Robert Novak

#87. Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#88. [ ... ]all men are writers, journalists scribbling within their skulls the narrative of what they see and hear[ ... ]

Terry Pratchett

#89. 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

#90. When in public poetry should take off its clothes and wave to the nearest person in sight; it should be seen in the company of thieves and lovers rather than that of journalists and publishers.

Brian Patten

#91. I have friends who are science journalists, and I'm seeing stories of theirs or talking with them about ideas that they're pitching. Certain kinds of science are around me all the time, like climate change and biology.

Paolo Bacigalupi

#92. 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.

Ben Bradlee

#93. In emerging democracies like Russia, in authoritarian states like Iran or even Yugoslavia, journalists play a vital role in civil society. In fact, they form the very basis of those new democracies and civil societies.

Christiane Amanpour

#94. It's only when journalists understand the role they play in this propaganda, it's only when they realize they can't be both independent, honest journalists and agents of power, that things will begin to change.

John Pilger

#95. Journalists are more powerful now than they've ever been, and we all know what power does. Anyone who disses the media is really asking for it. But it is the case that the journalists are what they are - world famous for vulgarity, alcoholism, spite.

Charles McGrath

#96. I'm a big fan of British journalists like 'The Independent's Robert Fisk, but it's hard to find voices like his in the U.S.

Jackson Browne

#97. We will certainly see teachers, journalists, artists and poets in space. Whatever it takes to the be the best is what it will take to get you into space.

Eugene Cernan

#98. To foment grievance and to set men at variance is the trade by which agitators thrive and journalists make money.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#99. 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

#100. Journalists are notoriously prone to exaggerate the beneficial impact of elections and to ignore more complex developments.

Patrick Cockburn