One of the cardinal rules of journalism: Once you have cabled a story you must stick by it and back it up, unless something completely overwhelming proves you to have been wrong. In such a...

It is the vice of the journalist, I once wrote, to think that history can always be reduced to experience, and of the scholar to think that experience can always be reduced to history. History...

Bradlee had been recruited with the idea that the New York Times need nod exercise absolute preeminence in American journalism.That vision had suffered a setback in 1971 when the Times published the Pentagon Papers. Though...

Rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read

Thanks to my solid academic training, today I can write hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information, which is how I got a good job in journalism.

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...

I wanted to make people think, to open their minds, to give them a full picture of what was happening in Iraq so they can decide whether they supported our presence there.

Traditional journalism, where reporters deliver information in a balanced and unbiased fashion, is rapidly fading into obscurity. This is especially evident on television where high profile reporters become bigger than the story, delivering news with...

Objectivity, in this sense, means that a person’s statements about the world can be trusted if they are submitted to established rules deemed legitimate by a professional community. Facts here are not aspects of the...

Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarist.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

I got a call froma cynical young American journalist…You know the sort. He’s lived in the Middle East for a little over five minutes so assumes he knows us natives well. I sip at a...

I do not believe the press is guilty of the charge that it abandoned its healthy skepticism in Iraq , and I would hate to see it draw the inference from New Orleans that ‘in...

Countless generations have set out convinced that they would succeed where other had failed – that’s where lawyers and reporters come from, you know. They’re the cynical corpses of idealistic young people who thought the...

The byline is a replacement for many other things, not the least of them money. If someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism as a profession, what will be apparent will be the...

They take journalism really seriously because they know the force that it is and can be.

Journalism over here is not only an obsession but a drawback that cannot be overrated. Politicians are frightened of the press, and in the same way as bull-fighting has a brutalizing effect upon Spain (of...

O jornalista é um poeta delicado: sempre acha o rascunho mais sincero do que o publicado.

vista dos autos”, paralisando a análise do caso.

Journalism is the art of coming too late as early as possible. I’ll never master that.

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 own use around the office.

Do you still think the world is vast? That if there is a conflagration in one place it does not have a bearing on another, and that you can sit it out in peace on...

Soon, challenges against the Post’s ownership of two television stations in Florida were filed with the Federal Communications Commission. The price of Post stock on the American Exchange dropped by almost 50 percent. Among the...

Playing pool with Korean officials one evening in the Koryo Hotel, which has become the nightspot for foreign businessmen and an increasing number of diplomats (to say nothing of the burgeoning number of spies and...

The press has the power to stimulate people to clean up the environment prevent nuclear proliferation force crooked politicians out of office reduce poverty provide quality health care for all people and even to save...

Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism’s dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.

I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would...

The working people of the Flint area hated this rag, but it was our only daily so you read it. Everyone called it the “Flint Urinal.” Editorially, the paper had historically been on the wrong...

I think that of all the principles for journalism, the most important is to complicate simple things and simplify complicated things. At first sight, you may think something is simple, but it may conceal a...

Newspapers, of course, need both news and fanfare. A blending of gossip and truth.

There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake.

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. [….] The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.

During discussions in his office, Bradlee frequently picked up an undersize sponge-rubber basketball from the table and tossed it toward a hoop attached by suction cups to the picture window. The gesture was indicative both...

There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth.

The wrong information will only lead to deformation

I’ve found there to be a tremendous amount of East Coast snobbery in the journalism world.

Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.

The media, like anything else, can be bought. Everything, it seems, has its price. Even the free press.

But into the first decades of the twentieth century, even at the New York Times, it was uncommon for journalists to see a sharp divide between facts and values. Yet the belief in objectivity is...

No honest journalist should be willing to describe himself or herseif as ’embedded.’ To say, ‘I’m an embedded journalist’ is to say, ‘I’m a government Propagandist.

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

June 17, 1972. Nine o’clock Saturday morning. Early for the telephone. Woodward fumbled for the receiver and snapped awake. The city editor of the Washington Post was on the line. Five men had been arrested...

This seems charmingly paradoxical: scientists seek one truth but often voice many opinions; journalists often speak of many truths while voicing a uniform view.

I had someone at the Houston police station shoot me with heroin so I could do a story about it. The experience was a special kind of hell. I came out understanding full well how...

Most journalists are impatient to get their legwork done and to start the actual writing

And I really believe good journalism is good business.

Sherman Reilly Duffy of the pre-World War I CHICAGO DAILY JOURNAL once told a cub reporter, ‘Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He...

Sometimes you do it to save face, thought Jerry, other times you just do it because you haven’t done your job unless you’ve scared yourself to death. Other times again, you go in order to...

Basta”,

With the development of the printing press, not only could text be mass-produced quickly, it could also be mass-produced quickly and incorrectly.