Quotes About Journalism

This is a very proud moment for journalism. I think The New York Times and The Washington Post are genuine champions in this moment. The role that they are playing in democracy is the role that you hear about journalism playing in civics classes. Other people are doing great work, but the Times and the Post have really been leaders. The public is watching, and they are hungry. They know something is wrong, there's a lot of anxiety out there. There's a real sense that the mission of journalism is very clear.

One of the sad things about contemporary journalism is that it actually matters very little. The world now is almost inured to the power of journalism. The best journalism would manage to outrage people. And people are less and less inclined to outrage.

I loved journalism until the day my journalism teacher, a man I revered, came by my desk and said, 'Are you planning on going into journalism?' I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'I wouldn't.' I said, 'Well, why not?' He said, 'You can't make a living.'

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.

Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to dramatic art, for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as possible.

I consider what I do on Deadspin to be based in the foundations of journalism, yes, based on the foundations of journalism that I have been trained and that I certainly use when I write for GQ and The New York Times and so on. Certainly, I think the language can be a little looser on the web, but I am held to the same standards and accuracy everyone else is.

Journalism schools are good to get a job, but I don't know what else they are good for. I don't like the word "journalism" to begin with. It's news reporting, and that consists of using your two feet. The only lesson, then, that you could give people is how to climb stairs, because there are no stories on the first floor.

A reckoning is coming on the state of the internet journalism, because right now, the way it's set up, there is so much room for libel to squeak through that you're going to see...they're going to rewrite the rule book on journalism very soon. They have to, because the bloggers are getting away with so much rumor-mongering about public officials and even private figures because they don't have editors and they don't have fact checkers and they don't have lawyers. There is going to be a price to pay somewhere down the line.

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.

I think when money starts to corrupt journalism, it undermines the journalism, and it undermines the credibility of the product, and you end up not succeeding.

Matt Drudge's role in the Monica Lewinski scandal] strikes me as a new and graphic power of the Internet to influence mainstream journalism. And I suspect that over the next couple of years that impact will grow to the point where it will damage journalism's ability to do its job professionally, to check out information before publication, to be mindful of the necessity to publish and broadcast reliable, substantiated information.

Good journalism should challenge people, not just mindlessly amuse them.

The first word I would remove from the folklore of journalism is the word objective.

If you work in either journalism or politics... you will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and it hurts both ways-but it doesn't hurt as much when you're right.

They take journalism really seriously because they know the force that it is and can be.

At Gallaudet, deafness isn't an issue. You don't even think about it. Students can pay attention to accounting or psychology or journalism. But when a deaf person goes to another college, no matter how supportive it is, that person doesn't get the same access.

It would be easy to descend into despair, not only about the state of journalism, but the future of American democracy. But giving up is not an option. There is too much at stake.

Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters.

People who think there is something pedestrian about journalism are just ignorant.

Journalism is not a profession, but a mission.

Given the multiple crises we are living through, investigative journalism is all the more important.

Without a serious study of journalism, there can be no understanding of citizenship, democracy, or community.

I cling to the basic set of tenets laid out in Tom Wolfe's 'New Journalism' - to get out there like the great French novelists of the 19th century and study life. I am a Tom Wolfe fan of the first order.

Journalists cover words and delude themselves into thinking they have committed journalism.

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.

Journalism has always existed in two different realities . . . the economic marketplace and [the] special institution to serve the public interest. The traditional balance between those two has become destabilized. Economic reality has taken over.

The country is only as strong as its journalism - that's the way democracies work. The higher the quality of the information, the better informed the electorate is and the better the government runs.

As electronic journalism came to be evaluated for its cost effectiveness, the network world began breaking up.

And after about two years, I realized that creative writing was not going to help you ace those biological tests. So I switched over to journalism. I didn't graduate with honors, but I did graduate on time and with some doing.

Letting journalism be from the perspective of the journalist. It's usually a no-no, and journalists are encouraged to be completely objective.

In journalism, especially, we tend to deal with large, complex systems by finding especially interesting people and story lines to focus on.

The thinner a newspaper or magazine is - due to reduced revenue from advertising dollars - the less editorial content because of the standard ad-to-editorial ratio, and the less money there is to support investigative journalism.

Journalism in America is dead. I've been saying it on the air since 2008.

A rat called Possible New Strain was sitting under a spaghetti strainer held down with a pile of journalism textbooks, saying rude things in rat-speak.

Journalism is often simply the industrialisation of gossip.

The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it.

Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.

When I entered politics, I took the only downward turn you could take from journalism.

I often plagiarize from myself. I like to think of this as ecological journalism: I recycle.

Language, journalism, food, sex. All is politics. Even innocent love stories are politics. ... There is no such thing as neutrality.

I realise that I had the best of serious picture journalism. There was an innocence in our approach, especially in the 1950s and 1960s when we naively believed that by holding a mirror up to the world we could help - no matter how little - to make people aware of the human condition.

There is nothing like daily journalism! Best damn job in the world!

I'm in the reporting part of journalism.

A man doesn't amount to something because he has been successful at a third-rate career like journalism. It is evidence, that's all: evidence that if he buckled down and worked hard, he might some day do something really worth doing.

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.

I went into broadcast journalism. I loved every class I took, I just got anxious because I came to the realization that you're groomed in high school to get good SAT scores to get into a good college or else you're done for.

Publishing is a business, but journalism never was and is not essentially a business. Nor is it a profession.

David Halberstam often wrote about the powerful, but his real sympathies lay with ordinary people. He was very uncomfortable with bigfoot Washington journalism - he thought it was lazy and self-serving.