Journalism Quotes - Page 28

• The newspaperman has become a walking plague. He spreads the contagion of lies and calumnies.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Lying, Calumny, Plague

  Mahatma Gandhi, U. R. Rao (1963). “The Way to Communal Harmony”, Ahmedabad, [India] : Navajivan Publishing House

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• Newspapers today have almost replaced the Bible, the Koran, the Gita and other religious scriptures.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Religious, Gita, Today

  Mahatma Gandhi, U. R. Rao (1963). “The Way to Communal Harmony”, Ahmedabad, [India] : Navajivan Publishing House

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• And journalism itself has changed. News organizations and some journalists have transformed from their traditional role as watchdogs of power into institutions of power themselves with an ability, indeed, a susceptibility, to abuse that power.

  Joan Konner

  Organization, Abuse, Roles

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• Never awake me when you have good news to announce, because with good news nothing presses; but when you have bad news, arouse me immediately, for then there is not an instant to be lost.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  News, Lost, Awake

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• Living more lives than one, knowing people of all classes, all shades of opinion, monarchists, republicans, socialists, anarchists, has had a salutary effect on my mind. If every year of my life, every month of the year, I had lived with reformers and crusaders I should be, by this time, a fanatic. As it is I have had such varied things to do, I have had so many different contacts that I am not even very much of a crank.

  Rheta Childe Dorr

  Years, Class, Knowing

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• 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.

  Neil Gaiman

  Details, Speech, Patterns

  "Ask the Author Live:Dana Goodyear with Neil Gaiman". www.newyorker.com. January 15, 2010.

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• With "Good Night, and Good Luck," I think it's kind of obvious what [Truman Capote]'s getting at there, and the importance of how it's playing out today, that is journalism doing, are the journalists doing their job, are they being the other checks and balances in our country that the way that obviously Edward R. Murrow was back then.

  Philip Seymour Hoffman

  Good Night, Country, Jobs

  Source: www.pbs.org

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

  Roy Peter Clark

  Community, Understanding, Democracy

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• 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.

  Alain de Botton

  People, Tasks, Care

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• Do not read the newspapers.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Reading, Newspapers

  Henry David Thoreau, David Gross (2007). “The Price of Freedom: Political Philosophy from Thoreau's Journals”, p.46, David M Gross

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• As a cub reporter, I devoured books about journalism.

  Lionel Barber

  Book, Cubs, Reporters

  Lionel Barber's Hugh Cudlipp lecture at London College of Communication, www.theguardian.com. January 21, 2011.

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• 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.

  Lionel Barber

  Cutting, Effort, Firsts

  "Financial Times editor Lionel Barber: 'News now is not the newspaper'". Interview with Roy Greenslade, www.theguardian.com. February 10, 2013.

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• In the end, the discipline of verification is what separates journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction, or art.

  Bill Kovach

  Art, Discipline, Fiction

  Bill Kovach, Tom Rosenstiel (2001). “The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect”, p.91, Three Rivers Press

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• The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge; and this, one would say, is all that saves it; but as I love literature and to some extent the truth also, I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Government, Wish, Literature

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Citizen Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience, Life Without Principle, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown”, p.226, Graphic Arts Books

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• Journalism only tells us what men are doing; it is fiction that tells us what they are thinking, and still more what they are feeling. If a new scientific theory finds the soul of a man in his dreams, at least it ought not to leave out his day-dreams. And all fiction is only a diary of day-dreams instead of days. And this profound preoccupation of men's minds with certain things always eventually has an effect even on the external expression of the age.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Dream, Men, Thinking

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• 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.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Writing, Years, Way

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• 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.

  Mary Augusta Ward

  Secret, Alive, Moments

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• If I wrote at all, I must throw myself headlong into the great political maelstrom, and would of course be swallowed up like a fishing-boat in the great Norway horror which decorated our school geographies; for no woman had ever done such a thing, and I could never again hold up my head under the burden of shame and disgrace which would be heaped upon me. But what matter? I had no children to dishonor; all save one who had ever loved me were dead, and she no longer needed me, and if the Lord wanted some one to throw into that gulf, no one could be better spared than I.

  Jane Swisshelm

  Children, School, Fishing

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• No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.

  H. L. Mencken

  Walking Sticks, Lynching, Revolution

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• I well recall my horror when I heard for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were then called bicycle pants and taken to golf; it was as if I had encountered a studhorse with his hair done up in frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a bit indelicate.

  H. L. Mencken

  Taken, Golf, Hair

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• I got my start in lefty journalism as a labor reporter at 'In These Times', and it's in my blood.

  Chris Hayes

  Blood, Lefties, Labor

  "Chris Hayes Says New MSNBC Show Will Continue Labor Coverage In Ed Schultz’s Tradition" by Dave Jamieson, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 15, 2013.

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• In my day a reporter who took an assignment was wholly on his own until he got back to the office, and even then he was little molested until his copy was turned in at the desk; today he tends to become only a homunculus at the end of a telephone wire, and the reduction of his observations to prose is commonly farmed out to literary castrati who never leave the office, and hence never feel the wind of the world in their faces or see anything with their own eyes.

  H. L. Mencken

  Eye, Wind, Office

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• Drill in exact translation is an excellent way of disposing the mind against that looseness and exaggeration with which the sensationalists have corrupted our world. If schools of journalism knew their business, they would graduate no one who could not render the Greek poets.

  Richard M. Weaver

  School, Our World, Greek

  Richard M. Weaver (2013). “Ideas Have Consequences”, p.167, University of Chicago Press

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• 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.

  Ian Hislop

  People, Bars, Stories

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• Prominent and influential editors, accustomed to deal with politicians, men of an infinitely lower grade, say, in their ignorance,that he acted "on the principle of revenge." They do not know the man. They must enlarge themselves to conceive of him.... They have got to conceive of a man of faith and of religious principle, and not a politician or an Indian; of a man who did not wait till he was personally interfered with or thwarted in some harmless business before he gave his life to the cause of the oppressed.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Religious, Revenge, Ignorance

  Henry David Thoreau (2007). “My Thoughts Are Murder to the State: Thoreau's Essays on Political Philosophy”, p.47, David M Gross

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