Quotes About Journalism

The quality of life in America is dependent on the quality of the journalism. Most people don't realize that, but if you think about it, journalism is one of the pillars on which our society is perched.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

It is chiefly, I regret to say, through journalism that such people find expression. I regret it because there is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

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.

... Don [Hewitt, 60 Minutes exec producer] told me, "You have set broadcast journalism back 20 years." Naturally, I was both proud and elated although too modest to say so, but broadcast journalism recovered with alacrity, my contract wasn't renewed, and the incident was forgotten.

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.

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.

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.

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"

Very rarely are you going to see the large shareholder or CEO of a corporation march into a newsroom and say, "Cover this story, don't cover that." It's a much more subtle process. The professional code adapts, but what we try to see, is how commercial and corporate pressure shape both the professional code and the sorts of things that are considered legitimate journalism and illegitimate journalism.

In a sense, journalism can be both helpful and detrimental to a writer of fiction because the kind of writing you need to do as a journalist is so different. It has to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and as a writer often you are trying to do things that are more ambiguous. I find that writing fiction is often an antidote to reading and writing too much journalism.

Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don't know certain things. Yet often, they know but just don't care. So the task of serious journalism isn't just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.

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

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.

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.

The story of journalism, on a day-to-day basis, is the story of the interaction of reporters and officials

Richard exhaled. It was like somebody sprinkling pepper on his wound: Thousands of Biafrans were dead, and this man wanted to know if there was anything new about one dead white man. Richard would write about this, the rule of Western journalism: One hundred dead black people equal to one dead white person.

I started as a print reporter. I’m a journalist and that’s what I do. My function is an anchorperson, but it’s in a journalism context, and gravitas and coats and ties and haircuts and all that sort of stuff, I’ll leave to others. My thing is just to do my job the best way I know how and as I say I’m very fortunate to be able to do it the way I want to do it.

I solemnly swear not to talk about Hillary's appearance, because that is not journalism.

It's funny but when young people say to me "what can I study to be a force for change, should I study law or biology or business?" My answer is music, drama, journalism, communications.

The tragedy of journalism is that these are people doing their best work.

Tailoring the facts to fit one's theory constitutes neither good science nor good journalism. Rather, it is intellectually dishonest and, when published for consumption by a mass audience, adds up to propaganda.

Journalism is about covering important stories-with a pillow, until they stop moving.

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.

I've created a vocabulary of different styles. I draw from many different ways to take a picture. Sometimes I go back to reportage, to journalism.

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

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.

I cherish the review-as-literature; as lapidary journalism in the eighteenth-century mode, the last hard sparkling diamond in theessayists's tarnished crown. To me, writing a good review is not just a way to make extra money, but a sacred duty.

I personally feel that there's a lot of music journalism that is dominated by genre, because you need a language in which to write, but actually the things that strike people about music, are very hard to write about, and its sonic connections, it's a sense of harmony that I think we all have even if we don't know how to express it - it's something musical, it's synapse connections in our brain.

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

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.

London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.

Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.

But my point is that competitive eating is a real sport, and I considered taking it up. But when I thought about what this would mean sitting around for hours, stuffing my face with unhealthy food I realized it was basically the same thing as journalism.

If we're going to live as we are in a world of supply and demand, then journalists had better find a way to create a demand for good journalism.

And I've been incredibly lucky to have a long career in journalism that has given me a front-row seat to some of the most important moments in modern American political life.

I've found there to be a tremendous amount of East Coast snobbery in the journalism world.

There was a lot of tabloid journalism about my supposed sex addiction. Bullshit. It's all bullshit. I mean, come on, I never pretended to be a saint. But give me a break.

I believe that the demand for long-form quality journalism is strong and I think that despite all of the changes in technology over the past few years, people still want in-depth, rigorous reporting.

If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.

I'm happy to have interns at The Weekly Standard and happy to have readers of The Weekly Standard, but if you all tell me that you were busy reading Plato and [Lev] Tolstoy and playing violin in the orchestra, I'd say that was great. I wouldn't tell you to take time out from that to get involved in political journalism.

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.

Yeah, I think of what I do as a work of journalism. It's more like the op-ed page, though. These are my opinions. My point of view. The opinions are mine and I let you make up your own mind.

Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.

Journalism was looked upon as a more noble thing than it is now. I don't know if it carries the same cachet that it did then.

Mexico just needs more journalists, and especially more good places to publish and exhibit. There are all kinds of censorship practiced in Mexico, not just violent repression. Perhaps the biggest threat to good journalism here is the massive power of the country's media monoliths - Televisa and TV Azteca - who have 80% of the market. They endlessly saturate the country with propaganda and inanity.

I think if you look at the failure of journalism in the modern age, then I don't want to be called a journalist.