Quotes on Journalism

Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

We cannot make good news out of bad practice.

I mean, I think everybody in the world, all the young people in the world, went to journalism school and wanted to investigate everything. And I think they overdid it. I think that you have to investigate things, you have to e skeptical, but you shouldn't be vengeful. You have to be fair and you have to be careful.

David Brinkley was an icon of modern broadcast journalism, a brilliant writer who could say in a few words what the country needed to hear during times of crisis, tragedy and triumph.

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

Democracies succeed or fail based on their journalism. America is strong because its journalism is strong. That is how democracies work. They're only as good as the quality of the information that the public possesses and that is where we come in.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

These days there's all too much coverage of pesudo-events about extraordinarily inauthentic people doing inauthentic things.

The idea that media is there to educate us, or to inform us, is ridiculous because that's about tenth or eleventh on their list.

In almost every profession - whether it's law or journalism, finance or medicine or academia or running a small business - people rely on confidential communications to do their jobs. We count on the space of trust that confidentiality provides. When someone breaches that trust, we are all worse off for it.

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism's problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance.

Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism.

If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.

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

I think when money starts to corrupt journalism, it undermines the journalism, and it undermines the credibility of the product, and you end up not succeeding.

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

Journalism is "a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world of misfits and drunkards and failures.