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Journalism When the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe. Thomas Jefferson The difference between the right word and the wrong word is the difference between lightning and lightning bug.Mark Twain To represent an issue or story is to educate and through education we learn to understand the people we live around. Therefore, to educate is to begin relationships that can change lives. Brian Wagner The art of writing is economy of attention. Herbert Spencer Say extraordinary things by using ordinary words. Schopenhauer 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 government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Col. Edward Carrington, Jan. 16, 1787 Without criticism and reliable and intellectual reporting, the government cannot govern. Walter Lippmann, address at the International Press Institute Assembly, London, May 27, 1965 Responsible journalism is journalism responsible in the last analysis to the editor's own conviction of what, whether interesting or only important, is in the public's interest. Lippmann Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. Mark Twain As the free press develops, the paramount point is whether the journalist, like the scientist or scholar, puts truth in the first place or the second. Lippmann Ink-fresh papers, millions of them - ink-fresh with morning, orange juice, waffles, eggs and bacon, and cups of strong, hot coffee. How fine it is, here in America, at ink-fresh, coffee-fragrant morning, to read the paper! Thomas Wolfe I got something out of working on a newspaper. I learned that I had to wind things up. I used to leave things half-written, you know. But things couldn't go in the paper unless they were rounded out. Robert Frost We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper ... Consider how little this village does for its own culture ... We need to be provoked -- goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. Henry David Thoreau What chiefly distinguishes the daily press of the United States from the press of all other countries pretending to culture is not its lack of truthfulness or even its lack of dignity and honor, for these deficiencies are common to newspapers everywhere, but its incurable fear of ideas ... its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion. It is, in the true sense, never well-informed. It is seldom intelligent, save in the arts of the mob-master. (And) it is never courageously honest. H.L. Mencken When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news. Frank O'Brien The vital measure of a newspaper is not its size but its spirit -- that is its responsibility to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, 1948 It is a newspaper's duty to print the news and raise hell. Chicago Sun Times editorial, 1861 The public ... demands certainties ... but there are no certainties. H.L. Mencken All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced upon them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else. H.L. Mencken Our republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic (corrupt) press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mold the future of the republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations. Joseph Pulitzer Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. (Spiro Agnew, Nixon's vice president, called the press "Nattering nabobs of negativism"). The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits, a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the side-walk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo cage. Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas My business is to communicate facts. My instructions do not allow me to make any comment upon the facts. My dispatches are sent to newspapers of all manner of politics. I, therefore, confine myself to what I consider legitimate news and try to be truthful and impartial. Lawrence Gobright, AP's pioneer Washington correspondent who covered the Civil War and Lincoln's assassination I was afterward surprised that I had succeeded in approximating so closely to all the facts in those dark transactions. Gobright, reflecting later on his account of the shooting of Abraham Lincoln Good style favors short words, short sentences, short paragraphs, short stories. Instructions to the AP staff in an early style book As the national campaign gets under way it is proper to remind the readers of The Tribune, whose news of the world is supplied by The Associated Press, that this famous news organization is not Republican or Democratic. It is not wet or dry. It is not Protestant or Catholic. As Kent Cooper, its general manager, explained in a radio address from Houston the other night, it is neutral on all issues. And so it is. Editorial in the Tampa (Fla.) Tribune, 1928 One of the signs of Napoleon's greatness is the fact that he once had a publisher shot. Siegfried Unseld Good journalists do it in time to make deadlines. All the news that's fit to print. Adolph Ochs Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. Mark Twain Journalism consists largely in saying -Lord Jones died- to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive. G.K. Chesterton If you don't want it printed, don't let it happen. Spies are of no use nowadays. Their profession is over. The newspapers do their work. Oscar Wilde Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one. A.J. Liebling Journalism is one of the last professions where it's advantageous to know a little bit of everything and a lot about nothing. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be misquoted, then used against you. If you want to be misinformed about world events, buy a newspaper. Henry Miller When a dog bites a man that is not news, but when a man bites a dog, that is news. Charles Anderson Dana Eschew Obfuscation. (go ahead, look them both up!) There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. Oscar Wilde Nothing in fine print is ever good news. Andy Rooney The First Law of Journalism: To confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it. Alexander Cockburn Most rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read. Frank Zappa If you don't like the news, go out and make some. Anyone nitpicking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it. Alvin Toffler This is not reality, this is journalism. Journalism is reality, Myrnalism is the Twilight Zone. Everywhere I go, I am asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they do not stifle enough of them. Flannery O'Connor Journalists don't court the muse - they've got deadlines. Slang is a deliberate invention by professional smart-alecks--college boys, reporters, newspaper men, and other dubious characters. H.L. Mencken The only reason this country is different from any place else is that once in a great while, this huge, snobbish, generally untalented news reporting business stops covering stories of interest only to itself and actually serves the public. Jimmy Breslin, columnist, The (New York) Daily News, Newsday Dip your pen into your arteries and write. William Allen White Don't assume that bad English can still be good journalism, or good science writing, or good business writing. It can't. Good English is the only passport. To have a decent career in America you need to be able to write a succession of clear, decent sentences." William Zinsser Easy writing makes hard reading. Ernest Hemingway To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. Not to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness. Czeslaw Milosz If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? Franz Kafka You have to realize that you can't manage the media. The media is by and large a mirror that is held up and into which we look. It's feedback. Ohio State Athletic Director Andy Geiger Journalism is literature in a hurry. Matthew Arnold Literature is news that stays news. Ezra Pound All structures in words are partly rhetorical, hence literary. Northrup Frye Now that is the way to write--peppery and to the point. Mush-and-milk journalism gives me the fan-tods. Mark Twain The difference between literature and journalism is journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. Oscar Wilde (1891) I believe the most average life is extraordinary, if you can just get to the truth of it. Artists of nonfiction can bring to people an enlarged clarification of their lives. Gay Talese The more transparency in a system, the more accountability in a system. The more accountability in a system, the better the system becomes. As I copied page upon page of important historical information, what attracted me were the stories of the people, the complexity of their emotions. Qian Gang Nothing overwhelms us so much as pure truth, nothing is more exotic than the world around us, nothing is more fantastic than reality. Egon Erwin Kisch What can I say about journalism? It has the greatest virtue and the greatest evil. It is the first thing the dictator controls. It is the mother of literature and the perpetrator of crap. In many cases it is the only history we have, and yet it is the tool of the worst men. But over a long period of time and because it is the product of so many men, it is perhaps the purest thing we have. Honesty has a way of creeping in even when it was not intended. John Steinbeck (letter to the U.S. Information Service) Literary journalism isn't about literary flourishes, it isn't about literary references. Literary journalism at its best asks the questions that literature asks: the nature of human nature and its place in a meaningless or perhaps meaningful cosmos. Ron Rosenbaum (in an interview with Tim Cavanaugh, Feed Magazine) [De Witt Wallace's] magazine Reader's Digest is so bad it may go over. There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public. H.L. Mencken The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. Mark Twain Special thanks to Glynn Wilson for a plethora of journalism quotes. Copyright İRonald W. Sitton, 2009. Revised 022606 - http://southerner.net/sitron/wis/wjour.html |