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.

The only thing which can keep journalism alive - journalism, which is born of the moment, serves the moment, and, as a rule, dies with the moment - is - again the Stevensonian secret! - charm.

A lot of people involved with celebrity journalism have interesting ideas about the people they want to write about going into the interview. Then as soon as they actually sit down with that person, they basically ask the questions they think journalists are supposed to ask, and they start viewing themselves almost as a peer of the subject. Like they're going to become friends. That's why most celebrity journalism is so terrible.

American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.

The more readings a novel has, even contradictory, the better. In journalism, you talk about what you know; you have provided yourself with records, you have gathered information, you have performed interviews. In a novel, you talk about what you don't know, because the novel comes from the unconscious. They are very different relationships with words and with the world. In journalism, you talk about trees; in the novel, you try to talk about the forest.

I want to set up a new standard: ‘scientific journalism.’ If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.

I came to nonfiction through journalism. My first book was journalism, and it was so frustrating to me, while I was writing it, that I wasn't capturing the moments the way they were when I lived them; I was filtering and re-filtering. I had to come to terms with the fact that I couldn't and shouldn't claim authenticity. Then, when the book was published and I gave readings, I'd hear myself read and it was like I was eavesdropping on a dream - even with myself as the narrator. I knew that guy but couldn't exactly recognize him.

The print magazine and print journalism industry is obviously in a great deal of trouble, and one of the things that happened when this business started to give way to the Internet and to broadcast television is that a lot of organizations started cutting specifically investigative journalism and they also started cutting fact-checkers.

Profiles aren't journalism.

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

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

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.

Anyone who knows anything about journalism knows that reporters are rarely in a position to investigate anything. They lack the authority to subpoena witnesses, to cross-examine, to scrutinize official records. They are lucky to get their phone calls returned.

Journalism is not a profession, but a mission.

Let me say this: I only expect the black media to uphold the standards of excellence in journalism and when you do that, you have to go in with a neutral mind.

I find having a column a very difficult form of journalism. I'm not a natural like Tom Friedman and Anna Quindlen.

For me, the best journalism is usually the best storytelling, and the best stories are those of real people.

Well, I mean, the real attack on truth is tabloid journalism in the United States.

We define journalism in America as the business and practice of presenting the news of the day in the interest of economic privilege.

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.

Media has changed dramatically, as you and I know. We're in a world now where you're rewarded for being outrageous. Punditry has replaced reporting as the gold standard of journalism.

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.

Conflict, when used as a device, makes for good television and bad journalism.

There is no more respected or influential forum in the field of journalism than the New York Times. I look forward, with great anticipation, to contributing to its op-ed page

In America journalism is apt to be regarded as an extension of history: in Britain, as an extension of conversation.

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

Journalism has become a sort of competitive screeching: what is trivial but noisy and immediate takes precedence over important matters that develop over time.

Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism... When we shift our attention from ‘save newspapers’ to ‘save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

Everything in journalism is about the detail that makes the whole, the attempts to reproduce speech patterns while not actually quoting the whole thing the person said.

Generally I try to read anything but indie rock journalism or anything about music at all, especially in the summer.

Journalism classes teach us that one must extract oneself from the story in order to report without bias, but often we need to be in the story in order to understand, to connect, to help the audience identify or else it has no heart; it could be a robot telling the story, for all anyone cares.

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.

The media has changed. We now give broadcast licenses to philosophies instead of people. People get confused and think there is no difference between news and entertainment. People who project themselves as journalists on television don't know the first thing about journalism. They are just there stirring up a hockey game.

We don't go into journalism to be popular. It is our job to seek the truth and put constant pressure on our leaders until we get answers.

Let's be clear on one thing, the corporate media in America is no longer involved in journalism. They're a political special interest no different than any lobbyist or other financial entity with a total political agenda, and the agenda is not for you, it's for themselves.

As a cub reporter, I devoured books about journalism.

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.

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.

The marvellous thing about writing, whether it be fiction or journalism, is that it is simultaneously the most intimate and the most anonymous of meetings between people. It is profoundly intimate in reaching into the psyche of another, at the same time as being devoid of social characteristics, cultural characteristics, economic characteristics.

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.

Authentic journalism is telling people something that the government doesn't want them to know.

I didn't know growing up what I wanted to do. I finally settled on broadcast journalism as a way to satisfy the urge to perform and also do something important, which is to give people in a democracy information to make good decisions.

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.

Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.

The Huffington Post Investigative Fund's goal is to produce a broad range of investigative journalism created by both staff reporters and freelance writers, with a focus on working with the many experienced reporters and writers impacted by the economic contraction. The pieces will range from long-form investigations to short breaking news stories and will be presented in a variety of media - including text, audio, and video.

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.

I like keeping my work so open that it can be interpreted on different levels. Art can't be compared with journalism; it can't discuss concrete issues.