Quotes About Journalism

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.

The best I can hope for is that I might provoke a water cooler argument between you and somebody else. But it is not journalism. It doesn't have the rigor of journalism. It doesn't have the proof positive that facts provide. So it can be readily dismissed as mere propaganda. But I can certainly reach more people.

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 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.

Eclectic is a word that appears almost as much as the word smarmy in rock journalism and I've come to the fact, just as a personal side, this reminds of Oscar Wilde's insight that criticism is the highest form of autobiography. I think that's exactly what rock journalism has attempted to do, to celebrate its autobiography at my expense.

Sure enough, as merger has followed merger, journalism has been driven further down the hierarchy of values in the huge conglomerates that dominate what we see, read and hear. And to feed the profit margins journalism has been directed to other priorities than "the news we need to know to keep our freedoms"

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

The fun thing about journalism is if you go do a story about something, you can now ask three intelligent questions about it. Or say three intelligent things. And that gets people talking.

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.

Every industry, there are rogues and bad actors. There could be rogues and bad actors in journalism. Rogues and bad actors in medicine. Rogues and bad actors in the legal community.

You're required to be outspoken in journalism, and in television you're exposed anyway, because everyone watches it.

It's very difficult to measure the impact on policy of any investigative journalism. You hope it matters to let a little more truth loose in the world, but you can't always be sure it does. You do it because there's a story to be told. I can tell you that the job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is about as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place.

We have standards. Anybody with the kind of journalism experience and professionalism that you have displayed over these years can not work for my program.

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.

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.

It is part of what makes America great. That tradition of the free press, and also the tradition of this highly competitive market for investigative journalism. We're seeing, there's no question, that we're seeing a renaissance of that.

There is nothing more common than critics of journalists accusing them of practicing journalism. It is our function in the world to take things that are complicated and render them in a form that non-experts can follow and make sense of.

A news sense is really a sense of what is important, what is vital, what has color and life - what people are interested in. That's journalism.

In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever.

At CNN, our view is that good journalism equals good business.

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

I really support criticism as a craft and as a vocation. People who devote as much time to thinking about sound through writing as I do practicing and forming it, the whole system of journalism seems to not yield rewards sustainable as a craft. So few can spend enough time to be serious about it and approach it with confidence and a kind of depth. And that's good on one level, because you have some leveling, that's kind of maybe leveled the petty fiefdoms of undeserving people but it's also made it hard to make a living as a writer.

I've always liked elliptical writing, whether it's Kafka or Paula Fox, and I'm often bored by writers who explain too much. I think that becomes journalism. Mostly I don't try to explain to readers who somebody is - I just write about the somebody. I'm thinking through ideas. And I have the sense that, if you're reading this, you have some interest.

Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.

I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst.

Simplification seems to be the removal of objects for the goal of making a graphic as clean and uncluttered as possible. Whereas, with optimization, it feels like there's more intelligence in that. It maintains the usability, but tries to distill something down to its essence. But with some data-sets you have to be careful because, as with linear, print journalism, it's easy to shave off facts that don't quite fit the flow.

Also, and this may sound naïve, but since my early days in journalism, I've felt that getting as close as possible to truth, revealing the reality of a situation in detail, has its own persuasive power. This allows readers to look at the facts and the perspectives presented and draw informed conclusions.

Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connections, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted.

Religion has become the blind spot of American journalism.

When I was in journalism school, you were taught to be completely objective. But we don't see that anymore.

The media does not do news. The media is the Democrat Party hacks assigned to journalism positions. Some hacks are consultants. Some are candidates. Some serve in elective office. Some are professors. Some are teaching assistants. Some run think tanks. Others are in the media.

For me, a really radical position for journalism to take is to stop being cynical. Cynicism is what passes for insight among the mediocre.

I'm very committed to and interested in CNN's journalism and our magazines and our movie studio, not just HBO, where I grew up. But I do have a fondness for subscription television.

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.

In the United Kingdom at various stages, journalism has been the profession of gentlemen amateurs. And some of them even pride themselves on being amateurs. Their quality is not comparable with the quality of intelligence services even if most of them harbor a remarkable degree of corruption and incompetence.

I don't have any well-developed philosophy about journalism. Ultimately it is important in a society like this, so people can know about everything that goes wrong.

When I finished grad school, I sort of fell into journalism. Someone mentioned that there was an entry level job at the Reuters News Agency. I applied, and, to my amazement, I got the job.

In this age of specialization, I sometimes think of myself as the last 'generalist' in economics, with interests that range from mathematical economics down to current financial journalism. My real interests are research and teaching.

As I'm sure anyone who's born after the '70s' access point is - is '70s films and '70s culture and there is a kind of a paranoiac atmosphere in that time in America. Yes, it's the golden age of journalism, Watergate, and all the rest of these people making these great breakthroughs - but it's also the moment that "if it bleeds, it leads" becomes mainstream and sensationalizing the news becomes more and more the given. Checking how many numbers you're getting, whatever you can do to get more numbers.

I am deeply interested in the progress and elevation of journalism, having spent my life in that profession, regarding it as a noble profession and one of unequaled importance for its influence upon the minds and morals of the people

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

Many years ago I had two small children, and I wanted to be able to be home when they got home from school. And I didn't like the direction journalism was taking. I thought if I could write books, I could work at home and have the best of both worlds. I wrote my first mystery while still working full time, and it didn't sell, but the next one did sell, so I quit my job for the world of fiction. Scary, but I've never regretted it for a single day.

Everyone seems to assume that the unscrupulous parts of journalism will be the frivolous or jocular parts. This is against all ethical experience. Jokes are generally honest. Complete solemnity is almost always dishonest. The writer of the snippet merely refers to a frivolous and fugitive fact in a frivolous and fugitive way. The writer of the leading article has to write about a fact he has known for 20 minutes as though he has studied it for 20 years.

The tremendous challenge of narrative journalism about subjects that are underreported is, how do you make people care about something they think they already know about, or think they don't need to know about?

A career in journalism suddenly lost its appeal.

Generally speaking, the best people nowadays go into journalism, the second best into business, the rubbish into politics and the shits into law

While the web is very much the first draft of history, a rough-cut, it still has to be good journalism, well-sourced, reliable. Clearly, the printed form is going to have more effort put into it, going to be more reflective and relevant.

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.