Quotessence
Home / Topics / Journalism Quotes

Journalism Quotes

Browse 1455 quotes about Journalism.

Related topics

PeopleThinkingWritingIfsNewspapersNewsMediaWayWorldStoriesFunnyLiteratureKnowsPressesKindFactsReportersFirstsTryingWantShouldNewspapers JournalismPoliticalHas BeensJobsArtFictionGood JournalismGivingRealInformationSchoolBelieveDoeMenWellsImportantLittlesLongNeedsDemocracyMeanOpinionYearsInvestigative JournalismProfessionTelevisionBookCollegeIdeasMayTodayTwoAmericaNewspaper ReportersDifferentFormMindReasonSaidStatesCountryFeelsInterestLyingProblemReaderRealityBigsLooksPersonsStillsGovernmentI CanNovelReadingSeriousShowsWantedAudienceBusinessCultureDoneHardMatterMomentsPrintSourceAbleCareersDifferencesEditorsEnoughEventsInterestingMightMovingObjectivesQualityRunningmore

Journalism Quotes

“The most frustrating aspect of all this is that most journalists know how to be tenacious. They know how to chase down a story, how to speak truth to power. In articles about atrocities committed by groups or nations that are not Western allies, nobody ever perishes in a blast. Buildings don’t collapse of their own volition. Civilian victims aren’t ordered by their interviewers to performatively condemn groups with which they have no affiliation. The violence is named, as is its perpetrator. Why this sudden clarity becomes utter fog when the subject is an Arab child torn to shreds by shrapnel or a Black motorist shot dead in a traffic stop or an Indigenous activist beaten at a pipeline protest is a function of preemptive deference to power.”

ViolenceMediaHonestyClarityJournalismArticlesTransparencyTenacityAccuracyJournalists
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Create image

“I also often ask my guests about what they consider to be their invisible weaknesses and shortcomings. I do this because these are the characteristics that define us no less than our strengths. What we feel sets us apart from other people is often the thing that shapes us as individuals. This may be especially true of writers and actors, many of whom first started to develop their observational skills as a result of being sidelined from typical childhood or adolescent activities because of an infirmity or a feeling of not fitting in. Or so I’ve come to believe from talking to so many writers and actors over the years.”

ActorsLonelinessSelf AwarenessIndividualityPersonal DevelopmentJournalismInterviewsWritersIntrospectionArtistsShortcomingsChildhood TraumaInterviewWeaknessesDefining MomentsInterviewingOutcastsNot Fitting InDefining YourselfWhat Makes Us Who We AreWhat Shapes Us
Book:All I Did Was Ask: Conversations with Writers, Actors, Musicians, and Artists
Create image

“Zombies are familiar characters in philosophical thought experiments. They are like people in every way except they have no internal experience.... If there are enough zombies recruited into our world, I worry about the potential for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will - or that the cloud of online people is a person; if they pretend there is nothing special about the perspective of the individual - then perhaps we have the power to make it so. We might be able to collectively achieve antimagic. Humans are free. We can commmit suicide for the benefit of a Singularity. We can engineer our genes to better support an imaginary hive mind. We can make culture and journalism into second-rate activities and spend centuries remixing the detritus of the 1960s and other eras from before individual creativity went out of fashion. Or we can believe in ourselves. By chance, it might turn out we are real.”

PhilosophyCultureFreedomCreativityTechnologyExperienceIndividualityJournalismFree WillZombiesSingularityThought Experiments
Book:You Are Not a Gadget
Create image

“The article was written in scraps of time, between snatched moments of sleep. This can’t be normal, she thought, exhilarated, typing away in her slip at three in the morning. She’d been brought up to believe in regular work that took place in nice, clean offices, between fixed hours. Yet here she was, in a hotel room that could be anywhere, weaving a story into being and feeling like if she stopped for a second to breathe, the whole thing would fall apart. As long as she got the next sentence out, and the one after that, she’d be all right.”

WritingPassionJournalism
Book:State of Emergency
Create image

“The death of a billionaire is worth more to the media than the lives of a billion poor people.”

LifeHumorDeathQuotesWealthPoorPovertyAudienceRichMediaHumourReaderNewsQuoteProfoundValueRichesNewspapersAdvertisingJournalismJournalistThoughtfulSatireMaterialismWealthyThought ProvokingDeepInsightfulFuneralArticlesAphorismDeadWorthQuotationsViewersMaximsSayingsRipMillionaireAdagesProverbsBillionaireAphorismsMake You ThinkMaterialisticLivesAxiomsCoffinsAdageReadersProverbSatiricalSayingEpigramsMass MediaBurialQuotationGnomeAdvertisersMaximRest In PeaceEpigramGnomesProvoke ThoughtMade Me ThinkJournalistsAxiomReadershipAdvertsDictumDictumsNet WorthCasketsCoffinNewspaperMillionBreaking NewsBillionMediumThe MediaNews AnchorsAudiencesCasketArticleAdPoverty LineAdvertAdvertiserViewerNews AnchorViewershipAdvertising SpaceAdvertising SpacesNews ReaderNews ReadersNewsreaderNewsreaders
Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Create image

“The Gallos had always kept a frugal household, and it hadn’t been until Tony went abroad that he realised that what he had always taken to be middle class was really, by any global standard, rich. The revelation had produced in him not relief or gratitude, but a new and deeply unpleasant sense of his own complicity, for Grandpa Gallo's legacy--a fortune he had never known existed, let alone expected to receive--had left him suddenly much wealthier than any of his friends. He had never mentioned the bequest to anyone; instead, he practised inconspicuous consumption, and began to cultivate a shabby hand-me-down appearance as a way of implying to everyone around him that, like them, he was only barely scraping by. It was partly to atone for this deception, and partly in continuation of it, that he had turned to journalism; having pretended for so long that the asceticism of his lifestyle was a sacrifice he had no other option but to make, he now felt an almost desperate desire to earn an income from his writing, and thereby prove in concrete terms that his life’s project, the expansion of his mind, was more than what he feared it might be--merely a form of inauthentic tourism financed, hypocritically, by those very social and economic structures that he claimed so energetically to oppose.”

WealthGuiltJournalismAsceticismComplicityScraping BySlumming
Book:Birnam Wood
Create image

“JOURNALISM, which shapes, modifies, or subtly suggests public attitudes and states of mind, morbidly attracts the owners of the great fortunes, for whose protection against popular disapproval and action there must be a constantly running defense, direct or implied, specific or general. The protective maneuvers often take the form, in this plutocratic press, of eloquent editorial assaults upon popular yearnings and ideas. The journalism of the United States, from top to bottom, is the personal affair bought and paid for by the wealthy families. There is little in American journalism today, good or bad, which does not emanate from the family dynasties. The press lords of America are actually to be found among the multimillionaire families.”

WealthJournalismClass StruggleClass WarfarePlutocracyJournalist Capitalism
Book:America's 60 Families
Create image

“If I beat my grandmother to death to-morrow in the middle of Battersea Park, you may be perfectly certain that people will say everything about it except the simple and fairly obvious fact that it is wrong. Some will call it insane; that is, will accuse it of a deficiency of intelligence. This is not necessarily true at all. You could not tell whether the act was unintelligent or not unless you knew my grandmother. Some will call it vulgar, disgusting, and the rest of it; that is, they will accuse it of a lack of manners. Perhaps it does show a lack of manners; but this is scarcely its most serious disadvantage. Others will talk about the loathsome spectacle and the revolting scene; that is, they will accuse it of a deficiency of art, or æsthetic beauty. This again depends on the circumstances: in order to be quite certain that the appearance of the old lady has definitely deteriorated under the process of being beaten to death, it is necessary for the philosophical critic to be quite certain how ugly she was before. Another school of thinkers will say that the action is lacking in efficiency: that it is an uneconomic waste of a good grandmother. But that could only depend on the value, which is again an individual matter. The only real point that is worth mentioning is that the action is wicked, because your grandmother has a right not to be beaten to death. But of this simple moral explanation modern journalism has, as I say, a standing fear. It will call the action anything else—mad, bestial, vulgar, idiotic, rather than call it sinful.”

DeathEvilGoodJournalismMannersInsanityEfficiencyAesthetics
Book:All Things Considered
Create image

“People nowadays talk about the world's problems like they're reading lines off a teleprompter. They recite what they're told and echo it without thinking. It has become easier to divide people than to unify them, and to blind them than to give them vision. We are no longer unified like a bowl of Cheerios. Instead, we have become as segregated as a box of Lucky Charms. Every day we see the same leprechauns on TV acting like they're the experts of everything.”

PeopleThinkingFaithPoliticsUnitedVisionSocietyMediaLiesBlindUnityCorruptionSocial MediaJournalismExpertsLiarsDivisionDividedFollowersHuman ConditionThinkSegregationMisleadZombiesUnifiedEchoRecitingPressDivideLucky CharmsReciteDistractMemorizeCheeriosSegragationTeleprompterThinking Ofr Yourself
Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Create image

“I don’t know how a reporter would ever understand a politician. Your job is supposed to be about finding the truth and enlightening people. Right? A politician’s job is about hiding the truth and fooling people. Right? You want us to be better informed so we get smarter. They think we’re dumb and it’s to their advantage to keep us that way.”

TruthPoliticianNewsSmartEnlightenmentLiesJournalismDumbSmarterReportersLieLies PoliticsReporterDumbnessWell Informed
Book:An Enigmatic Escape: A Trilogy
Create image

“Indeed, to this day, I think if you blame everything on the government, you're not just wrong, you're being reckless. It's as silly as blaming everything on the Freemasons, or the Illuminati, or insert-bad-guy-here. But I do believe that someone must ask the hard questions, especially of our elected officials as well as powerful men who become members of so-called secret societies. Remember: Governments don't lie. People lie. And if you want the real story, you need to find out more about those people.”

GovernmentTruthLyingHistoryLiesBlameGuiltJournalismConspiracyInvestigationSkepticismQuestionsConspiracy TheoryConspiracy TheoriesBlaming OthersConspiraciesQuestion EverythingSkepticsFinding Truth
Book:History Decoded: The 10 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time
Create image

“Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.”

TruthFilmScienceReligionFaithLiteraturePoliticsUnited StatesProgressAtheismSelf LoveEnlightenmentArgumentLiesHumanismConvictionRussiaSocialismJournalismCommunismIronyGermanyLos AngelesIndividualismSouth AfricaCold WarSoviet UnionTotalitarianismCritical ThinkingOrthodoxyBerlinSelf PityApartheidPostmodernismLiterary CriticismSectarianismTribalismPopulismEuphemismHedonismMonotheismGeorge OrwellMunichGroupthinkSolipsismPolytheismThomas MannPotusRonald ReaganRadical PoliticsMargaret ThatcherRight Wing PoliticsLeft Wing PoliticsApoliticismGeorge Hw BushBought PriesthoodXhosa PeopleZulu PeopleCape ColouredsEurocentricismGerman PeoplePersonality Politics
Book:For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports
Create image

“Base your understanding of the world on data, rather than journalism. Journalism is a highly non random sample of the worst things that have happened in any given period. It is an availability machine, in the sense of Tversky and Kahneman's availability heuristic; namely - our sense of risk, danger and prevalence is driven by anecdotes, images and narratives that are available in memory. A lot of good things are either things that "don't happen" (like a country at peace, or a city that has not been attacked by terrorists, which almost by definition are not news), or things that build up incrementally, a few percentage points a year, and then compound (like the decline of extreme poverty). We can be unaware, out to lunch about what's happening in the world if we base our view on the news. If instead we base our view on data, then not only do we see that many (although not all) things have gone better (not linearly, not without setbacks and reversals, but in general a lot better... and that paradoxically, as I've cheekily put it, progressives hate progress), but also that the best possible case for progress - that is, for striving for more progress in the future, for being a true progressive - is not to have some kind of foolish hope, but to look at the fact that progress has taken place in the past; and that means: why should it stop now?”

ProgressNewsOptimismJournalismDataPessimismMass MediaProgressivismCognitive BiasesWorldview And Perception
Author:Steven Pinker
Create image

“Though anger seems a pessimistic response to a situation, it is at root a symptom of hope: the hope that the world can be better than it is. The man who shouts every time he loses his house keys is betraying a beautiful but rash faith in a universe in which keys never go astray. The woman who grows furious every time a politician breaks an election promise reveals a precariously utopian belief that elections do not involve deceit. The news shouldn’t eliminate angry responses; but it should help us to be angry for the right reasons, to the right degree, for the right length of time – and as part of a constructive project. And whenever this isn’t possible, then the news should help us with mourning the twisted nature of man and reconciling us to the difficulty of being able to imagine perfection while still not managing to secure it – for a range of stupid but nevertheless unbudgeable reasons.”

HopeNewsOptimismAngerJournalism
Book:News
Create image

“Lubię pisać listy. Zawsze myślałem, że gdybym urodził się w bogatej rodzinie i trzysta lat temu tam, gdzie urodziłem się w biedzie, we Florencji, chciałbym tylko podróżować po całym świecie, żeby pisać listy. Dziennikarstwo do pewnego stopnia pozwoliłó mi robić coś podobnego, ale byłem ograniczony iłością miejsca, terminami, wymogami języka. Teraz w końcu mogę po prostu pisać listy.”

WritingLettersJournalism
Book:Lettere contro la guerra
Create image

“Journalism is not like fiction and will never be. In fiction, you can feed people with lies, yet at the end of the reading, people still live the same life - go to work, eat, come back home, and sleep - nothing really changes aside from, at the very least, their perception of the world. But, things are different in journalism. You tell people a barefaced life, they will believe it, and something is going to happen. People will promptly respond to what they believe is true because it relates to their life, and we take life seriously, don't we?”

LifeInspirationalVirtueIntegrityNewsValueJournalismReports
Book:Bits of Heaven
Create image

“The New York Times was here, CNN, they were all holding their stories until the dates came back. And I was thinking maybe they'll come back at 20,000 years ago maybe even 25,000 years ago, and I'll be out of here clean. This is going to be easy. But the date that came back was 50,000--ancient beyond all imagining and right at the limits of radiocarbon. Since then we have OSL-dated the deposit and those dates also came back in the range of 50,000. So we've got it dated two ways, but still the skeptics keep saying that what we've found can't be a human site and that our artifacts must be works of nature because they're so different from the artifacts found at other sites. To which my response is: 'Well... you've never dug a 50,000-year-old site in America, right? There's a first time for everything.”

ScienceHumanityDatingJournalismSkepticismArchaeologyDeep Human History
Author:Albert C. Goodyear
Create image

“I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job... The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress.”

TruthMediaJournalismCensorshipInvestigative Journalism
Book:Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Cocaine Explosion
Create image