Journalists should be watchdogs, not lapdogs.

If you’re not pitching, stop bitching

I think people should be consumers of journalism.

Despair is the central part of the psychopathology. For the handmaiden of gossip is treachery:

The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be part of it. If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without...

The only school that let me in was U.C. Santa Cruz, which is where I went. They didn’t have a journalism program, so I took sociology, which is the closest thing to journalism.

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on...

We were the ones on scene when everything went down. We weren’t better. We weren’t worse. We were just the ones standing in the blast radius.

A good businessman must have nose for business the same way a journalist has nose for news. In places where people see a lot of obstacles, I see a lot of opportunities. A good businessman...

This is the very structure of sports journalism: deification and damnation, death and resurrection, failure and redemption. You succeed so you can falter so you can succeed again. We need a rise and a fall....

We have to defend views we don’t share and impose them on the public; deal with questions we don’t understand and vulgarize them for the gallery. We can’t have ideas of our own, we have...

If you don’t hit a newspaper reader between the eyes with your first sentence, there is no need of writing a second one.

Rosenfeld runs the metropolitan staff, the Post’s largest, like a football coach. He prods his players, letting them know that he has promised the front office results, pleading, yelling, cajoling, pacing, working his facial expressions...

a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda” by his former idolators; to see the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regarded with fear and suspicion by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (which...

In an expansive attempt to establish a foothold among California’s intelligentsia and create America’s first truly national newspaper, The New York Times launched a slimmed-down West Coast edition in October 1962… The result in LA...

* *Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.*Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and...

Innovation and disruption are ideas that originated in the arena of business but which have since been applied to arenas whose values and goals are remote from the values and goals of business. People aren’t...

Reporters trade in pain. It sells papers. Everyone knows that.

In the very first month of Indian Opinion, I realized that the sole aim of journalism should be service. The newspaper press is a great power, but just as an unchained torrent of water submerges...

In early 1970, Newsweek’s editors decided that the new women’s liberation movement deserved a cover story. There was one problem, however: there were no women to write the piece.

There hasn’t been a scandal this big at the C.I.A. since (CLASSIFIED) committed (CENSORED) to (REDACTED).

Freedom of the press can never be the licence to say anything one desires. Freedom of the press is not the freedom to slander and attack and must never be used to fight other people’s...

Hardly unaware of his image, Bradlee even cultivated it. He delighted in displaying his street savvy, telling a reporter to get his ass moving and talk to some real cops, not lieutenants and captains behind...

Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.

Like so many others of my tenure and temperament—stubborn ancients, I suppose—web reporting is anathema to everything I love about newspapering: getting a tip, developing leads, fleshing-out the details, then telling the story. Now it...

They’re called ‘facts’, and my role is to amplify those, not cheerlead. And I don’t care at all what you think of my motives.

Everything is in the way the material is composed.

If it’s true that nothing is more potent than an idea, then those who control the media can direct minds en masse.

Cosy Moments cannot be muzzled!

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

Equal time is not necessary when dealing with evil. Nazis do not merit equal or fair treatment.

‎Theorists of journalism have long noted parallels to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in physics: by reporting on something, one subtly but irrevocably changes it.

The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it

Journalism, to me, is just another drug – a free ride to scenes I’d probably miss if I stayed straight. But I’m neither a chemist nor an editor; all I do is take the pill...

Most magazines have become wallpaper, they’re all the same, all the same celebrities. It’s really an abysmal time in American journalism right now. But occasionally one story or two will pop out.

Where are reliable journalism and reliable investigative voices going to come from? I love the days of old – the Walter Cronkites, the Dan Rathers.

Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about...

The fault I find in our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other everyday, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything...

Opponents past and present have the same essential weakness about them: first they want to use you, then they want to be you, then they want to snuff you out.

How the press, for example, loves to brag to its victims— its readers—about its freedom. Yes, the press may be free to lie and distort and suppress and deceive and malign, but is it free...

I’m sure it’s all journalism […] It means it’s true enough for now.

Notre rôle n’est pas d’être pour ou contre, il est de porter la plume dans la plaie.

But you’re absolutely sure we’re right?’ The question carried an intensity absent from the previous conversation. ‘I remember talking with Henry Kissinger,’ she continued, ‘and he came up and said ‘What’s the matter, don’t you...

I have had my mother’s wing of my genetic ancestry analyzed by the National Geographic tracing service and there it all is: the arrow moving northward from the African savannah, skirting the Mediterranean by way...

As the final computerized decade of the twentieth century came into view, time itself seemed to speed up and compress into smaller and smaller bytes, leaving less and less time over the breakfast table to...

[O]nce demagogy and falsehoods become routine, there isn’t much for the political journalist to do except handicap the race and report on the candidate’s mood.

It’s very odd to look at. This is the duck-billed platypus of journalism, an egg-laying mammal with fur – it’s just something very bizarre.

I’ve always wanted to be a journalist, but what am I going to do? Write articles about which movie star had the fat sucked from her ass and injected into her face? Which professional athlete...

disguise repetitiousness of fact under variety of form: skin your fact each time and lay on a new cuticle of words. It deceives the eye; you think it is a new fact; it gives you...

Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.