Journalistic Quotes & Sayings

After working as a journalist I went to a writing program at Johns Hopkins. It was interesting because it was neither journalistic nor historical, but it emphasized writing style, and afterwards I was asked to write my first book. — Iris Chang

Indeed in the full flush of journalistic passion and conviction I once told an interviewer that of course I would never get married. And I most definitely would never have children. — Christiane Amanpour

Here we are in the century of information, that is to say the unformed. Every kind of literature will be journalistic, with a science for ballast. — Julien Torma

Inventing sources is not a crime in and of itself, although it certainly violates every code of journalistic ethics known to man. A criminal fraud case would require that the reporter's deceit had been malicious and resulted in financial gain. — Brendan I. Koerner

Lack of understanding, along with outright anti-Christian prejudice, leads to journalistic amazement or horror at the supposed self-deception of those who do see a spiritual realm. — Marvin Olasky

Pain observed is journalistic pain. It's diplomatic pain. It's television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set. — John Le Carre

For an academic to launch a public conversation about journalistic integrity, the role of religion in society, scholarship and faith is a dream come true. These are the kinds of things that we sit around talking to each other about in our dusty libraries. To see these conversations take place in popular culture is the best thing that could have ever happened. — Reza Aslan

If we don't have a vigorous questioning, aggressive journalistic community and mythology, democracy itself is in great jeopardy. — Milton Glaser

When I began taking photographs I thought they might work better in magazines, in a journalistic sense, rather than as art. — Gillian Wearing

Journalistic conventions make it hard for reporters to deal with a big, complicated lie. — Michael Kinsley

Among all the complaints you hear these days about the crimes of the media, it seems to me the critics miss the big one. It is that especially TV, but also we of the print press, tend to reduce mess and complexity and ambiguity to a simple story line that doesn't reflect reality so much as it distorts it ... What bothers me about the journalistic tendency to reduce unmanageable reality to self-contained, movielike little dramas is not just that we falsify when we do this. It is also that we really miss the good story. — Meg Greenfield

It's necessary to understand what real intelligence work is. It will never cease. It's absolutely essential that we have it. At its best, it is simply the left arm of healthy governmental curiosity. It brings to a strong government what it needs to know. It's the collection of information, a journalistic job, if you will, but done in secret. — John Le Carre

A country is mostly the people in it," Maud said. "I don't love England. My parents died a long time ago, and my brother has disowned me. I love Germany. For me, Germany is my wonderful husband, Walter; my misguided son, Erik; my alarmingly capable daughter, Carla; our maid, Ada, and her disabled son; my friend Monika and her family; my journalistic colleagues . . . I'm staying, to fight the Nazis. — Ken Follett

And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life. — Mark Strand

After 9/11, many of the most important news outlets in America abdicated their role as a check to power - the journalistic responsibility to challenge the excesses of government - for fear of being seen as unpatriotic and punished in the market during a period of heightened nationalism. — Edward Snowden

Sometimes in news photography and so on, the pictures are a little bit dry, and put on the page and just set in a journalistic way in front of you. — Chris Hondros

The advent of the Internet exposed the fact that the old business model for newspapers was broken. The world wide web fundamentally changed the media eco-system, challenging established journalistic practice in what is known as the mainstream media: radio, television, newspapers and magazines. — Lionel Barber

Do not be taken in by 'insiderisms.' Fledgling columnists, eager to impress readers with their grasp of journalistic jargon, are drawn to such arcane spellings as 'lede.' Where they lede, do not follow. — William Safire

The biggest journalistic game-changer of our time has been the rise of social media and the overgrowth of faux news sources - league- and team-sponsored blogs, player tweets, fanboy sites, rumor mills - churning bits of information and speculation into a clattering fog storm. Who will cut through the drivel and whim-wham to tell us what's really going on? — Robert Lipsyte

Since in the age of the internet we are all publishers, each of us bears some private responsibility for the public's sense of truth. If we are serious about seeking the facts, we can each make a small revolution in the way the internet works. If you are verifying information for yourself, you will not send on fake news to others. If you choose to follow reporters whom you have reason to trust, you can also transmit what they have learned to others. If you retweet only the work of humans who have followed journalistic protocols, you are less likely to debase your brain interacting with bots and trolls. We — Timothy Snyder

I think it is quite untrue that it is standard journalistic practice to name the interviewer when quoting from an interview. — Fareed Zakaria

When I started to be published I thought about Margaret Bourke-White and the whole journalistic approach to things. I believed I was supposed to catch life going by me - that I wasn't to alter it or tamper with it - that I was just to watch what was going on and report it as best I could. This shoot with John was different. I got involved, and I realized that you can't help but be touched by what goes on in front of you. I no longer believe that there is such a thing as objectivity. — Annie Leibovitz

My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness - what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new! — D.H. Lawrence

There are no journalistic ethics that transcend the value of human life. There are none. In a situation where you can save a human life, you must. There isn't any conflict in my mind. — Sebastian Junger

I am an emotional and fragile person. I observe life, I am perceptive and can read a person's body language. I have a strong journalistic streak in me, and had I not been a filmmaker, I would have become a film journalist. I have combined my perceptive and journalistic traits to create my own brand of cinema. — Madhur Bhandarkar

I can only answer that I tried to tell the truth and, if not be objective, at least be fair; history is not served when reporters prize trepidation and propriety over the robust journalistic duty to tell the whole story. — Randy Shilts

It is important to remember that, as Ken Auletta wrote in his definitive Greed and Glory on Wall Street, "no reporter can with 100 percent accuracy re-create events that occurred some time before. Memories play tricks on participants, the more so when the outcome has become clear. A reporter tries to guard against inaccuracies by checking with a variety of sources, but it is useful for a reader - and an author - to be humbled by this journalistic limitation. — Bryan Burrough

Thoughtfully or thoughtlessly he had left the keys in the ignition, and I switched on the radio. It was tuned to WQED. A local arts reporter I didn't particularly admire was interviewing old Q. about his life and work and personal demons. I reflected for a moment on the journalistic euphemism that allowed personal demons to writers who were only fucked up. — Michael Chabon

I don't think in terms of that bizarre tautology 'value for money' in my literary and journalistic work - and nor will I in my academic role. However, if I don't believe I'm helping my students towards a fuller and more empowering relationship with the world, then I'll resign. — Will Self

By a twist of fate rather than anything approaching journalistic enterprise, I did the last major interview with Johnny Carson. — Tom Shales

If you retweet only the work of humans who have followed journalistic protocols, you are less likely to debase your brain interacting with bots and trolls. — Timothy Snyder

Journalistic information and presentation actually discourage action ... we think we know, and because we think we know, we think we care. But it stops there. — Alfredo Jaar

It is woefully hard to find good, or even merely literate, writers, and they laugh at me when I say that sloppy, go-as-you-please writing carries less authority than decent prose. You must remember our public, they say. And indeed that is what I do, and I think the public is fully able to deal with the best they can produce. Patronizing the public, and assuming that it hangs, breathless, upon what it reads in the papers, is almost the worst of journalistic sins. — Robertson Davies

If anything is guaranteed to annoy a lexicographer, it is the journalistic habit of starting a story with a dictionary definition. — Erin McKean

Something seems to happen to people when they meet a journalist, and what happens is exactly the opposite of what one would expect. One would think that extreme wariness and caution would be the order of the day, but in fact childish trust and impetuosity are far more common. The journalistic encounter seems to have the same regressive effect on a subject as the psychoanalytic encounter. The subject becomes a kind of child of the writer, regarding him as a permissive, all-accepting, all-forgiving mother, and expecting that the book will be written by her. Of course, the book is written by the strict, all-noticing, unforgiving father. — Janet Malcolm

Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos. — Ben Hecht

The four pillars of wisdom that support journalistic endeavors are: lies, stupidity, money-grubbing, and ethical irresponsibility. — Marlon Brando

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 readers can access that news for free. One question is, how do you make a living in that kind of environment? If you can't, it's difficult to put the right resources behind it ... Even behind a paywall, websites can summarize your work and make it available for free. From a reader point of view, the reader has to ask, 'Why should I pay you for all that journalistic effort when I can get it for free from another site?' — Jeff Bezos

By journalistic custom and D.C. law, of course, reporters don't carry guns to news conferences
and certainly not when the person at the lectern is the NRA's Asa Hutchinson, an unremarkable former congressman and Bush administration official whom most reporters couldn't pick out of a lineup. But the NRA wasn't going to leave any doubt about its superior firepower. — Dana Milbank

The most effective check and balance on government has been an independent press which maintains its credibility by ensuring that its criticism is balanced and based on fact - based indeed on solid journalistic work. — Malcolm Turnbull

There is no higher claim to journalistic integrity than going to jail to protect a source. — Thomas Frank

I was working my first adult job, a quasi journalistic job, writing content for a website. In the offices, we had banks of TVs, papers, a constant media stream, which was unusual for 2001. — Garth Risk Hallberg

The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform. — George Steiner

A good journalistic organisation upholds four values: inform, reflect, crusade, connect. — Jane Eisner

I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes's horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to, — Matthew Freud

A journalistic purpose could be someone with a Xerox machine in a basement. — Antonin Scalia

You know, that is one of the consequences of the weak sense of responsibility of the press. The press does not feel responsibility for its judgments. It makes judgments and attaches labels with the greatest of ease. Mediocre journalists simply make headlines of their conclusions, which suddenly become generally accepted. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Dadaab is a vivid reminder that refugee problems don't end simply because journalistic interest moves elsewhere. The inhabitants themselves are irremediably stuck. They can't go back to Somalia because it isn't safe and they can't go elsewhere in Kenya because Kenya has problems enough of its own without having 134,000 Somalis pitching up in Nairobi or Mombasa, looking for food and work. And so way out in the desert there exists this strange city-that-isn't-a-city filled with people who have nowhere to go and nothing much to do. — Bill Bryson

So far as a man may be proud of a religion rooted in humility, I am very proud of my religion; I am especially proud of those parts of it that are most commonly called superstition. I am proud of being fettered by antiquated dogmas and enslaved by dead creeds (as my journalistic friends repeat with so much pertinacity), for I know very well that it is the heretical creeds that are dead, and that it is only the reasonable dogma that lives long enough to be called antiquated. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Casual reliance on unnamed sources ... corrodes our credibility and, in cases that are rare but not rare enough, may abet journalistic malpractice. — Bill Keller

'The Guardian,' with its deep journalistic traditions, is careful about context and explanation. It sees itself as a gatekeeper, and it worries about consequences. — Graydon Carter

I'm still an old-school reporter at heart. Writing fiction satisfies my journalistic need to hear and relay the testimony of everyday people at the center of events. — Karen Traviss

There are a few critics overseas, and occasionally a critic will write an astute analysis of the movie. There is value in reading critics that actually have something intelligent to say, but the journalistic community lives in a world of sound bites and literary commerce: selling newspapers, selling books, and they do that simply by trashing things. They don't criticize or analyze them. They simply trash them for the sake of a headline, or to shock people to get them to buy whatever it is they're selling. — George Lucas

I'm struggling at the end to get out of the valley of hectoring youth, journalistic middle age, imposture, moneymaking, public relations, bad writing, mental confusion. — Stephen Spender

At Gatling-gun tempo word-perfect the first time out. the journalistic equivalent of a high-wire front somersault without a net. — Shana Alexander

I have been a sports fan my whole life. To be able to talk about sports in an intelligent, journalistic fashion and to do things of a serious nature is a dream job. — Bryant Gumbel

I don't think Capote loved Smith. But he did make a deep connection. It upset some people, because that had never been the approach to journalistic crime writing, to look into the mind of the killer. — Gerald Clarke

I think people always appreciate somebody else's informed educated opinion. To the degree that anybody with a computer can offer a journalistic point of view whether or not they have a degree, it sort of alters the validity of you have to place on anyone's individual comment. — Seth Green

Nathan seemed to have absorbed his sense of journalistic ethics from old movies about newspaper reporters. For Naomi, internet sampling ad scratching was a completely valid form of journalism, presenting no ethical clouds on its open-source horizon. — David Cronenberg

If I wanted to take a more activist or journalistic slant in work, I should probably just go be an activist or a journalist. But I'm happy being a comedian. — John Oliver

Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard. Some people don't. Obviously I don't. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature. — James Frey

Hunter and I never got proper journalistic accreditation to go anywhere. Nobody was giving us passes to go in here or there. We always had to somehow talk our way in. — Ralph Steadman

I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn't seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts. — William S. Burroughs

The short stories tend to be a journalistic gathering of anecdotes that are put together to make something larger. — Chuck Palahniuk

I think it's very healthy to use journalistic and legal techniques to investigate the evidence for and against Christianity and other faith systems. — Lee Strobel

It goes to show you how we in the press so often miss the big stories that are right under our noses. There is a famous journalistic legend about the time a young reporter covered the Johnstown flood of 1889. The kid wrote: God sat on a hillside overlooking Johnstown today and looked at the destruction He had wrought. His editor cabled back: Forget flood. Interview God. — Roger Ebert

For decades, the journalistic norm had been that the private lives of public officials remained private unless that life impinged on public performance. — Roger Mudd

In those simpler days, you could just take pictures of movie stars and show them the way they were, as normal human beings. And if I felt part of any movement at the time, it was just to do that - to be journalistic and photograph what is, rather than what is made up. — Elliott Erwitt

I think that if you feel imaginatively towards a subject, you really shouldn't do it in a journalistic context, because then you're just fabricating, and that's crazy. — Hilton Als

14. Finally, the last characteristic of the menippea: its concern with current and topical issues. This is, in its own way, the "journalistic" genre of antiquity, acutely echoing the ideological issues of the day. — Mikhail Bakhtin

The journalistic tradition so exalts novelty and flashy discovery, as reputable and newsworthy, that standard accounts for the public not only miss the usual activity of science but also, and more unfortunately, convey a false impression about what drives research. — Stephen Jay Gould

I'm not trying to be in your face and take a picture that is like a journalistic kind of image. I got interested in a kind of complicated, compiled, visual field. — Teju Cole

By a peculiar thermometric adjustment, when a woman's talent is at zero, journalistic approbation is at the boiling pitch; when she attains mediocrity, it is already at no more than summer heat; and if ever she reaches excellence, critical enthusiasm drops to the freezing point. — George Eliot

Comics shouldn't be 'tools' for anyone's agenda except for the characters. And I am speaking only of super hero action comics. I love many of the alternative comics that are like journalistic stories. Documentary comics, a mix of reportage and fiction. Those are just great. — Ann Nocenti

I am thrilled to become international 'Vogue' editor at Conde Nast International, which has a real commitment to journalistic excellence, and to have the opportunity to write for a wider global audience through the 'Vogue' websites. — Suzy Menkes

It has been said that a rolling stone gathers no moss. I would add that sometimes a rolling stone also gathers no verifiable facts or even the tiniest morsels of journalistic integrity. — Ed Helms

The characters and action in this story are purely fictitious. Should the description of certain journalistic practices result in a resemblance to the practices of Bild-Zeitung, such resemblance is neither intentional, nor fortuitous, but unavoidable. — Heinrich Boll

Bill Clinton also benefited from a friendly press corps. With their baby boomer background, more liberal views, and Ivy League lawyer credentials, the Clintons fit the mold of many of the baby boomer reporters. In time, of course, the press would turn on Clinton. In the 1992 campaign, however, it seemed to me that some news outlets allowed their zeal for change to undermine their high standards of journalistic objectivity. (The pattern would later repeat with another exciting candidate promising change, Barack Obama.) — George W. Bush

Nowhere. No one is ever going to hear from you again, sir. No one."
'Uh ... well ... I ... '
'You profane my world, sir! I cannot ... I will not permit you to exist ... here!"
'In that case, Doctor, why not tell me of your work? You know ... condemned man's last request.'
He walked over and put a paternal arm around my shoulders, but the grip of his hand was like steel. He was a lot stronger than he looked. Not big or beefy. But strong.
'Just a dumb reporter ... doing his job ... '
He looked closely at me, eye to eye.
'You grovel nicely, Mr ... '
'Kolchak, sir.'
'Story. You want your story, do you, Mr. Kolchak? Your precious, pitiful story? Your bloody pound of journalistic flesh?'
I smiled but it stuck halfway into a sickly grin. I was clammy. I was trembling. I could feel my wet trouser leg sticking to my flesh and was grateful I'd eaten nothing solid. — Jeff Rice

The key question facing those of us working in the media (old and new) is whether we embrace and adapt to the radical changes brought about by the Internet or pretend that we can somehow hop into a journalistic Way Back Machine and return to a past that no longer exists and can't be resurrected. There is no question that, as the industry moves forward and we figure out the new rules of the road, there will be - and needs to be - a great deal of experimentation with new revenue models. — Arianna Huffington

This is why I like Diakopoulos' approach of using technology to answer a need. He identifies four news consumers needs: 1. staying informed; 2. gaining personal identity (through, for example, reinforcing one's values); 3. integrating and interacting socially (finding the basis for conversation); and 4. being entertained. He next defines 10 key journalistic functions: 1. truth 2. independence 3. impartiality 4. public interest 5. watchdogging 6. organizing forums 7. informing 8. storytelling 9. aggregating 10. sensemaking — Jeff Jarvis

Granted, there is still that picture of the Terminator jeering over practically every journalistic attempt to engage with the subject. — Nick Bostrom

When I need journalistic honesty, I have to turn to Al Jazeera, why is that? One cannot even deny the Holocaust in Europe, question 9/11 in America (unless you want the Ward Churchill treatment), but the West claims they're all about free speech. — Remi Kanazi

Ah, the pleasure, the joy - a big news story that runs and runs, that is played down by some of our journalistic colleagues, saying 'it'll never happen', only to be confirmed by the Home Secretary. — Kamal Ahmed

I often notice how students can gain the capacity to use certain critical methodologies through engaging with very different texts - how a graphic novel about gentrification and an anthology about Hurricane Katrina and a journalistic account of war profiteering might all lead to very similar classroom conversations and critical engagement. I'm particularly interested in this when teaching law students who often resist reading interdisciplinary materials or materials they interpret as too theoretical. — Dean Spade

What's going on with you? Jared asked out of the blue.
Beginning a new era of journalistic history, Kami told him, sending her cheer through their connection. Also, to be perfectly honest, Angela and I were slapping our asses.
As one does. — Sarah Rees Brennan

The local liberal press, much molested by the censorship, had its courageous and skilful writers such as VM Doroshevich, the master of that semi-literary and semi-journalistic essay at which Bronstein himself was one day to excel. — Isaac Deutscher

Somewhere in the dim recesses of the journalistic soul lies the horrible suspicion: This is really a pretty shallow and maybe unseemly way for a grownup to make a living. — Andrew Ferguson

Most centrist Democrats ... try to distance themselves from controversies that recall the 1960s. There are journalistic centrists as well, who avoid hard truths for the sake of acceptance and legitimacy. — Tom Hayden

The journalistic photographer can have no other than a personal approach; and it is impossible for him to be completely objective. Honest - yes. Objective - no. — W. Eugene Smith

I had covered wars in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq and elsewhere, but the work had started to feel routine. I wanted to leave the journalistic herd, to find a project that would both daunt and inspire me. Facing down the Congo was just such a project. — Tim Butcher

You learn nothing if you carry with you a journalistic system of values, which is invented to save reporters from experience. — Kenneth Rexroth

Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease and luxury until the appointed day where their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses - the days of interviews - are over. And still they say yes when a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife. — Janet Malcolm

Some objects and events may be photographed, others, if one is to render their true quality, should be painted or set to music, since their essence is more faithfully reproduced through imagination than by the journalistic report. — Ilka Chase

This is the first time in my 32 years in public broadcasting that PBS has ordered up programs for ideological instead of journalistic reasons. — Bill Moyers

In a way, I think we all want to look to that journalistic voice as a kind of global omniscience, a big eye to correct for our own limited purview: "Here's a realistic accounting of the world in which we live." — Karen Russell

It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists - Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stalin was once a journalistic hack, and I can personally testify to how frustrated they are. Pol Pot left a very edgy photo collection behind. And Osama seems quite interested in video. — P. J. O'Rourke

The images that people see in the media of black people - whether journalistic or narrative - remain horrible. And those images, combined with the lack of respect among black people in the poorer neighborhoods for themselves, and the part the police and other people coming into those neighborhoods play, it creates no value for life. — Harry Lennix

Aping urbanity,
Oozing with vanity,
Plump as a manatee,
Faking humanity,
Intellectual inanity,
Journalistic calamity,
Fox Noise insanity,
You're a profanity,
Hannity — John Cleese

Journalism and the questions of journalistic ethics, and why certain stories are put on the air, when, how and for what reasons, are big questions in our culture and society. — Thomas Sadoski