I’m an unabashed elitist. Everyone needs a good editor, and there is peril in worshiping amateurism and the unedited in science, art, and journalism.

The Post is famous for its investigative journalism. It pours energy and investment and sweat and dollars into uncovering important stories. And then a bunch of websites summarize that [work] in about four minutes and...

What matter is the information, not what you think about it.

Until the August 1 story about the Dahlberg check, the working relationship between Bernstein and Woodward was more competitive than anything else. Each had worried that the other might walk off with the remainder of...

Commenting acidly on a writer whom I perhaps too naively admired, my old classics teacher put on his best sneer to ask: ‘Wouldn’t you say, Hitchens, that his writing was somewhat journalistic?’ This lofty schoolmaster...

In the developed countries of the capitalist world, the mass media are beginning to become businesses, and huge businesses at that. The freedom of journalists is now becoming, in most cases, a very relative thing:...

The term propaganda rings melodramatic and exaggerated, but a press that—whether from fear, careerism, or conviction—uncritically recites false government claims and reports them as fact, or treats elected officials with a reverence reserved for royalty,...

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.

Style and voice are different. Style is standard conventions of writing. Voice is the distinct way an individual puts words together. All good writers have a near-uniform understanding of style but a voice all their...

Media work needs ideals. Maybe thirty years from now, after I retire, I’ll see the media mature and make the transition from political party, interest group, and corporate to truly public. But over the next...

A paparazzi is merely an extremely nosy nobody with a camera—and bills to pay.

You’re miserable, edgy and tired. You’re in the perfect mood for journalism.

The dirty little secret of journalism is that it really isn’t a profession, it’s a craft. All you need is a telephone and a conscience and you’re all set.

Jessamine recoiled from the paper as if it were a snake. “A lady does not read the newspaper. The society pages, perhaps, or the theater news. Not this filth.””But you are not a lady, Jessamine—,”...

You will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and it hurts both ways–but it doesn’t hurt as much when you’re right.

Journalism is a giant catapult set in motion by pygmy hatreds.

We had all opted to take City’s financial reporting course work, which, in theory, meant we wanted to write about stock prices and corporate takeovers. That, of course, was a joke. No one still in...

We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true,...

A short story is a writer’s way of thinking through experience… Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction’s aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.

I think I was always interested in the larger world, even as a kid, and my experiences as a journalist only heightened that interest. Covering conflict, I learned that though leaders often try to create...

Meantime the Newspaper of Record goes around in a little pleated skirt shaking pompoms, leaping in the air with an idiot grin if so much as a cement mixer passes by.

So what if twenty of these are non-stories, I at least had five I believed in.

A prize-winning science reporter, Simons had become the number-two editor at the Post a year before. An intent, sensitive man with a large nose, thin face and deep-set eyes, he looks like the kind of...

All you have to do [to win a Pulitzer Prize] is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then...

The owners and top managers of most news media organizations tend to be conservative and Republican. This is hardly surprising. The shareholders and executives of multi-billion-dollar corporations are not very interested in undermining the free...

What you read in the newspapers, hear on the radio and see on television, is hardly even the truth as seen by experts; it is the wishful thinking of journalists, seen through filters of prejudice...

Of real sensational journalism, as it exists in France, in Ireland, and in America, we have no trace in this country. When a journalist in Ireland wishes to create a thrill, he creates a thrill...

London is one of the world’s centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications....

Les secrets rendent le désir encore plus fou.

It’s true that journalism in reality is not the journalism that we learnt in the university. It is far from it.

The newspapers! Sir, they are the most villainous — licentious — abominable — infernal — Not that I ever read them — no — I make it a rule never to look into a newspaper.

The greatest influence over content was necessity–they had holes to fill on every page and jammed in any vaguely newsworthy string of words, provided it didn’t include expletives, which they were apparently saving for their...

We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest,...

Deep Throat stamped his foot. ‘A conspiracy like this…a conspiracy investigation…the rope has to tighten slowly around everyone’s neck. You build convincingly from the outer edges in, you get ten times the evidence you need...

I realize that I am not a journalist. So anything I say is not important.

If we had met five years ago, you wouldn’t have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me … I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows,...

Fearlessness can be its own form of power.

Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what George Orwell called the ‘official truth’. They simply cipher and transmit lies. It really grieves me that so many of my fellow journalists...

I think journalism anywhere should be based on social justice and impartiality, making contributions to society as well as taking responsibility in society. Whether you are capitalist or socialist or Marxist, journalists should have the...

Janet Malcolm had famously described journalism as the art of seduction and betrayal. Any reporter who didn’t see journalism as “morally indefensible” was either “too stupid” or “too full of himself,” she wrote. I disagreed....

It takes a lot of moola to fool around with national magazines, regardless of their politics. It takes even more if the paper is hell bent on shoving a hot poker up the rear end...

Being the lead face of a network news division is still the Holy Grail of broadcast journalism.

But newspapers have a duty to truth,’ Van said.Lev clucked his tongue. ‘They tell the truth only as the exception. Zola wrote that the mendacity of the press could be divided into two groups: the...

So much for Objective Journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here–not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results,...

Journalism, look you, is the religion of modern society.

The three rules of journalism are 1. Mislead, 2. Misinform, and 3. Misdirect. The news serves to sever you from reality and keep you in Fantasy Land.

In the English language, it all comes down to this: Twenty-six letters, when combined correctly, can create magic. Twenty -six letters form the foundation of a free, informed society.

Looking back, I still can’t believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of ‘experts’ all contradicting one another, all trying...

A bug lies in quiet repose;when he passed no one knows.Did he suffer, was he pained?Before he died, was knowledge gained?Were all life’s pressures much too great.To put upon so small a weight?Although not one...

Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product.