Journalist Quotes - Page 32

• The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers' own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs.

  Russell Baker

  Jobs, Office, Speech

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• A newspaper, as I'm sure you know, is a collection of supposedly true stories written down by writers who either saw them happen or talked to people who did. These writers are called journalists, and like telephone operators, butchers, ballerinas, and people who clean up after horses, journalists can sometimes make mistakes.

  Daniel Handler

  Horse, Mistake, Media

  "The Vile Village". Book by Daniel Handler, 2001.

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• I am a writer, a professional journalist with serious credentials in Crime, Craziness, and Politics. I have mingled with dangerous criminals and attended many trials . . . from Hell's Angels, Black Panthers and Chicano street fighters to Roxanne Pulitzer and even Richard Nixon, back in the good old days before he was run out of the White House for fraud, perjury, graft, and criminal negligence.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Running, Angel, White

  Hunter S. Thompson (2012). “Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream”, p.275, Pan Macmillan

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• A person does feel sheepish picking on journalists, a class already so richly despised that if a planeload of them crashed in flames, most people would smile from pure reflex.

  Garrison Keillor

  Flames, Class, People

  Garrison Keillor (1994). “The Book of Guys: Stories”, Penguin Group USA

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• I'm not rational enough to be a good journalist.

  Jim Harrison

  Literature, Enough, Rational

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, themorningnews.org. June 7, 2004.

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• The responsibility that I feel is to do as good a job as a journalist as I can possibly do.

  Ted Koppel

  Jobs, Responsibility, Feels

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• My faith is in my colleagues. And when I meet other writers, journalists, who've been doing this for a long time, trying to make us aware of what it is that we're living in, I put my faith in those people.

  Barry Lopez

  Long, People, Trying

  Interview with Bill Moyers, www.pbs.org. April 30, 2010.

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• Being a journalist, I never feel bad talking to journalism students because it’s a grand, grand caper. You get to leave, go talk to strangers, ask them anything, come back, type up their stories, edit the tape. That’s not gonna retire your loans as quickly as it should, and it’s not going to turn you into a person who’s worried about what kind of car they should buy, but that’s kind of as it should be. I mean, it beats working.

  David

  Mean, Talking, Car

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• Making information free is survivable so long as only limited numbers of people are disenfranchised. As much as it pains me to say so, we can survive if we only destroy the middle classes of musicians, journalists, and photographers. What is not survivable is the additional destruction of the middle classes in transportation, manufacturing, energy, office work, education, and health care. And all that destruction will come surely enough if the dominant idea of an information economy isn't improved.

  Jaron Lanier

  Pain, Class, Ideas

  Jaron Lanier (2014). “Who Owns the Future?”, p.16, Simon and Schuster

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• Freedom of the press is not questioned when investigative journalism unearths scandals, But that does not mean that every classified state document should be made available to journalists.

  Otto Schily

  Mean, Scandal, Doe

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• Usually when I drank too much, I could guess why I did so, the objective being to murder a state of consciousness that I didn't have the courage to sustain--a fear of heights, which sometimes during the carnival of the 1960s accompanied my attempts to transform the bourgeois journalist into an avant-garde novelist. The stepped-up ambition was a commonplace among the would-be William Faulkners of my generation; nearly always it resulted in commercial failure and literary embarrassment.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Ambition, Height, Too Much

  "The war on drugs and alcohol is a war against human nature" by Lewis Lapham, www.theguardian.com. December 10, 2012.

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

  Bill Moyers

  Mistake, Journalism, Libel

  Bill Moyers (2008). “Moyers on Democracy”, p.109, Anchor

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• It's a truism that denials never quite catch up with charges. Honest journalists who may have mistakenly printed false information know that the most prominent retraction never quite undoes the damage done by the original publication.

  Tom Wicker

  May, Information, Never Quit

  "IN THE NATION; Lesson of Lattimore" by Tom Wicker, www.nytimes.com. June 9, 1989.

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• The hired journalist, I thought, ought to realize that he is partly in the entertainment business and partly in the advertising business - advertising either goods, or a cause, or a government. He just has to make up his mind whom he wants to entertain, and what he wants to advertise.

  Claud Cockburn

  Government, Mind, Advertising Business

  Claud Cockburn (1967). “I, Claud ...: the autobiography of Claud Cockburn”

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• Never trust a journalist.

  Wendy Cope

  Never Trust

  2001 If I Don't Know,'How to Deal with the Press'.

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• Sometimes, I genuinely enjoy having conversations with journalists; enjoying the few moments of intimacy with a stranger is fascinating to me. But once in a while that backfires and you're suddenly reading something that has a bent on it that you didn't feel was in the least bit a part of the conversation that you thought you were having. Then you get overly protective and say very little and then you come out of the hole again.

  Gillian Anderson

  Reading, Littles, Sometimes

  The Observer Interview, October 01, 2000.

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• You should never fall in love with your own press clippings, because it is very much the nature of the beast that the same journalists who build you up between Monday and Friday tear you down for weekend fun...My family's habit of living in the past seems to me pathological, even dangerous. If all greatness lies in the past, what is the point of the future?

  Stephen L. Carter

  Friday, Falling In Love, Monday

  "The Emperor of Ocean Park". Book by Stephen L. Carter, 2002.

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• The first job of the historian and of the journalist is to find facts. Not the only job, perhaps not the most important, but the first. Facts are the cobblestones from which we build roads of analysis, mosaic tiles that we fit together to compose pictures of past and present. There will be disagreement about where the road leads and what reality or truth is revealed by the mosaic picture. The facts themselves must be checked against all the available evidence. But some are round and hard--and the most powerful leaders in the world can trip over them. So can writers, dissidents and saints.

  Timothy Garton Ash

  Jobs, Powerful, Reality

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• Would that it were so! ... That the American military were targeting journalists.

  Ann Coulter

  Military, American Military

  "Coulter: 'Would that it were so! ... That the American military were targeting journalists.'" by Oliver Willis, www.mediamatters.org. February 10, 2005.

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• In Britain, journalists often view comparisons with our society going back two, three, or seven centuries as more relevant than comparisons going back two, three, or seven decades. Drunkenness centuries ago is more illuminating than comparative sobriety 30 years ago. The distant past, selectively mined for evidence that justifies our current conduct, becomes more important than living memory.

  Anthony Daniels

  Memories, Past, Views

  "Selective Memory". www.city-journal.org. July 6, 2004.

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• One colleague who's been in the industry longer than I had been gave me a valuable piece of advice. "Stay close to the facts and observe things fully and report. Then you can be a mediocre journalist." I held onto his words when I worked and I've been following that advice for 16 years.

  Hark-Joon Lee

  Years, Advice, Pieces

  "This journalist didn’t just interview North Korean defectors, he followed them on their escape". Interview with Anna Fifield, www.washingtonpost.com. June 20, 2015.

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• I think I was able to endure risks not because I was ambitious about great stories but I was curious as a journalist.

  Hark-Joon Lee

  Thinking, Risk, Ambitious

  "This journalist didn’t just interview North Korean defectors, he followed them on their escape". Interview with Anna Fifield, www.washingtonpost.com. June 20, 2015.

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• To be a good sports journalist takes many things, but the main thing it takes is the ability to listen and follow your nose - see something, sense something and follow it.

  Steve Bunce

  Sports, Noses, Ability

  Source: www.bbc.co.uk

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• I'm not a journalist any more. I don't have to stick a microphone up somebody's nostril and I don't have a camera lens behind my shoulder, I think people talk to me in a much franker way.

  Gerald Seymour

  Thinking, People, Cameras

  Source: www.theguardian.com

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• If you want to know what's really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty.

  Jaron Lanier

  Money, Artist, Musician

  Jaron Lanier (2010). “You Are Not a Gadget”, p.83, Vintage

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