Journalism

"The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them."

"To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, "by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only." Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. . . . I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."

"I deplore with you the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, & mendacious spirit of those who write for them: and I enclose you a recent sample, the production of a New England judge, as a proof of the abyss of degradation into which we are fallen. These ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste and lessening its relish for sound food. As vehicles of information and a curb on our functionaries, they have rendered themselves useless by forfeiting all title to belief. That this has in a great degree been produced by the violence and malignity of party spirit I agree with you..."

"They lied about it! The enemy boils the ocean, cooks the sixth fleet and every man, woman and child within fifty miles of a shoreline - you could expect some coverage. What did they report? Minor soil erosion in the Florida Keys. They boiled the ocean, woman!"

"What people outside do not appreciate is that a newspaper is like a soufflé, prepared in a hurry for immediate consumption. This of course is why whenever you read a newspaper account of some event of which you have personal knowledge it is nearly always inadequate or inaccurate. Journalists are as aware as anyone of this defect; it is simply that if the information is to reach as many readers as possible, something less than perfection has often to be accepted."

"They were professional tantrum artists who only knew one thing: how to bludgeon the West to death with identity politics. And now, with the most arousing irony I have been witness to in years, we can safely say, "#TimesUp"."

"My problem, and our problem — I think this is a view that's pretty widely shared in the news business — is, you know, we, and I don't just mean The Times, are too ready to publish the blandest of quotes, or, sometimes, the idlest of gossip and innuendo, behind a cover of anonymity. I think it cheapens the currency of source protection."

"Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment."

"The Seven Subjects of Sensational Journalism: crime, scandal, speculative science, insanity, superstitions such as numerology, monsters, and millionaires."

"As to [[Douglas MacArthur|[General Douglas] Macarthur]], I don't feel in a position to have clear opinions about anyone I know only from newspapers. You see, whenever they deal with anyone (or anything) I know myself, I find they're always a mass of lies & misunderstandings: so I conclude they're no better in the places where I don't know."

"The Web sites of interest groups generally advance the cause of journalganda, in that everything is presented through the filter of the interest group. […] It is an odd, unreal world but very important because it's where partisans can go to have their thoughts re-enforced. There's nothing like journalganda to make you feel absolutely certain you are correct, no matter what your position. […] Real journalism can always be identified by the way it makes normal people sometimes feel very uncomfortable about the world."

"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. 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."

"In our society, the journalist ranks with the philantropist as a person who has something extremely valuable to dispense (his currency is the strangely intoxicating substance called publicity), and who is consequently treated with a deference quite out of proportion to his merits as a person. There are very few people in this country who do not regard with rapture the prospect of being written about or interviewed on a radio or television program."

"I have come to think […] the character called "I" in a work of journalism […] is unlike all the journalist's other characters in that he forms the exception to the rule that nothing may be invented: the "I" character in journalism is almost pure invention. Unlike the "I" of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of the writer, the "I" of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way—the way, say, that Superman is connected to Clark Kent. The journalistic "I" is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life. Nevertheless, readers who readily accept the idea that the narrator in a work of fiction is not the same person as the author of the book will stubbornly resist the idea of the invented "I" of journalism; and even among journalists, there are those who have trouble sorting themselves out from the Supermen of their texts."

"The moral ambiguity of journalism lies not in its texts but in the relationships out of which they arise—relationships that are invariably and inescapably lopsided. The "good" characters in a piece of journalism are no less a product of the writer's unholy power over another person than are the "bad" ones.[…] The fact that the subject may be trying to manipulate the journalist—and none but the most otherworldly of subjects is above at least some manipulativeness—does not offset the journalist's own sins against the libertarian spirit.[…] There is an infinite variety of ways in which journalists struggle with the moral impasse[…]. The wisest know that the best they can do […] is still not good enough. The not so wise, in their accustomed manner, choose to believe there is no problem and that they have solved it."

"Whistleblowers are essential to good journalism. They allow reporters to get behind... the walls of secrecy built up by officials and press officers. The whistleblowers reveal abuses and wrongdoing within governments, companies, the military, intelligence agencies. These whistleblowers should be rewarded for their courage; instead, too often they end up facing prosecution or jail."

"If Julian is to be prosecuted, then there’s a equally good case for the editor and journalists in The Guardian... New York Times, Der Spiegel, El País, La República and all the other organizations involved in this coverage being prosecuted, too."

"As Michael Schudson pointed out in “Discovering the News” (1978), the notion that good journalism is “objective”—that is, nonpartisan and unopinionated—emerged only around the start of the twentieth century. Schudson thought that it arose as a response to growing skepticism about the whole idea of stable and reliable truths. The standard of objectivity, as he put it, “was not the final expression of a belief in facts but the assertion of a method designed for a world in which even facts could not be trusted. . . . Journalists came to believe in objectivity, to the extent that they did, because they wanted to, needed to, were forced by ordinary human aspiration to seek escape from their own deep convictions of doubt and drift.” In other words, objectivity was a problematic concept from the start... Lippmann’s argument was that journalism is not a profession. You don’t need a license or an academic credential to practice the trade. All sorts of people call themselves journalists. Are all of them providing the public with reliable and disinterested news goods?"

"Between 1945 and 1975, there was one woman in the Cabinet and one Black person. Each served for two years. On the press side, it was worse. Female and Black reporters were programmatically excluded. They had no entrée to certain press functions, and editors did not assign women to cover government affairs. Flat-out racism and sexism persisted much longer than seems believable today. The two main social organizations for Washington journalists were the Gridiron Club (founded in 1885) and the National Press Club (founded in 1908). The Gridiron invited members’ wives to a dinner in 1896, but a skit lampooning the suffrage movement did not go over well, and women were not allowed back until 1972. Into the nineteen-fifties, members performed in blackface for entertainment at Gridiron dinners. McGarr reports that the club’s signature tune was “The Watermelon Song,” sung in dialect. The National Press Club did not have a Black member until 1955, which was the first year that women were allowed to attend luncheons where members were briefed by officials. The women had to sit in the balcony and were not allowed to ask questions. The National Press Club did not have a woman member until 1971. The Washington Post hired its first Black reporter in 1951. He was assigned his own bathroom, and left the paper after two years. (McGarr says that the Post did not hire another Black reporter until 1972, but that’s incorrect: the paper hired Dorothy Gilliam in 1961, and Jack White in 1968.) Far into the civil-rights movement, the Times had very few Black reporters. The record of general-interest magazines, including this one, was hardly better."

"The power of the press, such as it is, is like the power of academic scholars, scientific researchers, and Supreme Court Justices. It is not backed by force. It rests on faith: the belief that these are groups of people dedicated to pursuing the truth without fear or favor. Once they disclaim that function, they will be perceived in the way everyone else is now perceived, as spinning for gain or status."

"Since there is no such thing as ideological truth, it follows that to the extent a reporter is a liberal reporter or a conservative reporter, or a Democratic or Communist or Republican reporter, he is no reporter at all."

"The newspapers were beginning to get on to Jaycie now. They had ignored her at first. Put things down to anyone and everything else. After all, it was a bit awkward for them having to do with a woman who was beautiful but apparently had no sex life; they didn’t know what to try and smear her with."

"Journalists who make mistakes get sued for libel; historians who make mistakes get to publish a revised edition."

"The freedom of speech and of the press, which are secured by the First Amendment against abridgment by the United States, are among the fundamental personal rights and liberties which are secured to all persons by the Fourteenth Amendment against abridgment by a state. The safeguarding of these rights to the ends that men may speak as they think on matters vital to them and that falsehoods may be exposed through the processes of education and discussion is essential to free government. Those who won our independence had confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning and communication of ideas to discover and spread political and economic truth."

"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."

"Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various "party lines"."

"Too many journalists, fixated as they are on today's events, have a weak sense of history."

"Fandom and journalism make bad bedfellows."

"In a world where everyone is a publisher, no one is an editor and that is the danger we face today."

"It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it."

"Secretive power loathes journalists who do their job: who push back screens, peer behind façades, lift rocks. Opprobrium from on high is their badge of honour."

"We journalists... have to be brave enough to defy those who seek our collusion in selling their latest bloody adventure in someone else's country... That means always challenging the official story, however patriotic that story may appear, however seductive and insidious it is. For propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home... In this age of endless imperial war, the lives of countless men, women and children depend on the truth or their blood is on us... Those whose job it is to keep the record straight ought to be the voice of people, not power."

"Why is WikiLeaks a landmark in journalism? Because its revelations have told us, with 100 per cent accuracy, how and why much of the world is divided and run."

"Journalists can help people by telling the truth, or by as much truth as they can find, and acting not as agents of governments, of power, but of people. That is real journalism. The rest is specious and false."

"To quote, without verifiable evidence, "western intelligence sources" is never journalism; it is almost always propaganda. I learned that as a reporter. The cold war drum beat of the BBC and others is leading us to a world war."

"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."

"Controversy? You can't be any kind of reporter worthy of the name and avoid controversy completely. You can't be a good reporter and not be fairly regularly involved in some kind of controversy. And I don't think you can be a great reporter and avoid controversy very often, because one of the roles a good journalist plays is to tell the tough truths as well as the easy truths. And the tough truths will lead you to controversy, and even a search for the tough truths will cost you something. Please don't make this play or read as any complaint, it's trying to explain this goes with the territory if you're a journalist of integrity. That if you start out a journalist or if you reach a point in journalism where you say, "Listen, I'm just not going not touch anything that could possibly be controversial," then you ought to get out."

"Good journalism questions the land of a thousand [forbidden topics] even at the risk of uncanny and disturbing findings. …Now, journalists are neither detectives nor spiritual preachers. It is enough when they do their job properly. But there is always also an investigative side to the journalistic profession, as well as an ethical one. Journalists are not detectives but through their job they can perform some measure of investigation; journalists are not detectives, but they can provide facts that detectives may somewhat use. Journalists are not even spiritual guides, but, properly doing their job, they can offer occasions and clues that can also help to somewhat nourish the soul of their readers. Let’s all wisely stay away from preaching journalism, but good journalists can at least avoid poisoning their own as well as their readers’ souls."

"What a monstrous thing that a University should teach journalism! I thought that was only done at Oxford. This respect for the filthy multitude is ruining civilisation."

"But I'll report it Where senators shall mingle tears with smiles."

"Report me and my cause aright To the unsatisfied."

"Bring me no more reports."

"I don't think it has ever been as scary as it is right now. Because it seems that all journalists are under threat"

"I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon."

"I don't want to be part of the story. I want to be an anonymous, quiet onlooker who tries to work out what the hell is happening - its not easy - and then tells other people about it. I don't like being a figure in the thing."

"The Press is at once the eye and the ear and the tongue of the people. It is the visible speech, if not the voice, of the democracy. It is the phonograph of the world."

"Journalism (definition): The art, or science, of representing life as a series of clichés."

"To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers."

"I've always had standards about writing well. There is art in this business. There is potentially great art."

"The art of a news reporter is to learn how to lull a victim, because all good reporters are confidence tricksters in embryo."