There would be other heroes now. Heroes for unpoetical times. William Cobbett for example. You’d never confuse William Cobbett with a poet ... The kind of language he favoured – earthy, course, direct and belligerent, the language of the pub and the barnyard, was such journalistic dynamite. ‘The labourers seemed miserably poor. Their dwellings are little better than pig-beds ...’ His twopenny trash The Weekly Political Register was a one-man revolution in journalism belching outrage in fifty thousand copies a week. Simon Schama, A History of Britain: Forces of Nature, BBC 2000
It’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. Hunter S Thompson
With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms. Hunter S Thompson
The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits – a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage. Hunter S Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I’ve already become a mastodon in print – I don’t see a consciousness for my kind of journalism. Hunter S Thompson
The courage in journalism is sticking up for the unpopular, not the popular. Geraldo Rivera
Many people would no more think of entering journalism than the sewage business – which at least does us all some good. Stephen Fry
Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence. Kingsley Amis
The lowest form of popular culture – lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives – has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage. Carl Bernstein
Any good broadcast, not just an Olympic broadcast, should have texture to it. It should have information, should have some history, should have something that’s offbeat, quirky, humorous, and where called for it should have journalism, and judiciously it should also have commentary. That’s my ideal. Bob Costas
It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers, and when powerful abusers are taken on, there’s always a bad reaction. So we see that controversy, and we believe that is a good thing to engage in. Julian Assange
If journalism is good, it is controversial by its nature. Julian Assange
I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers. Mahatma Gandhi
Better a good journalist than a poor assassin. Jean-Paul Sartre
American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant. H L Mencken
One thing I learned as a journalist is that there is at least one disgruntled person in every workplace in America – and at least double that number with a conscience. Hard as they try, they simply can’t turn their heads away from an injustice when they see one taking place. Michael Moore, Here Comes Trouble
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 Urina’. Editorially, the paper had historically been on the wrong side of every major social and political issue of the twentieth century – ‘the wrong side’: meaning whatever side the union workers were on, the Urinal took the opposite position. ibid.
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 to seem more ‘shocking’ and ‘in-depth’ than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do. Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves. George Orwell
I keep telling myself to calm down, to take less of an interest in things and not to get so excited, but I still care a lot about liberty, freedom of speech and expression, and fairness in journalism. Kate Adie
Journalism is literature in a hurry. Matthew Arnold
The central dilemma in journalism is that you don’t know what you don’t know. Bob Woodward
The best people nowadays go into journalism, the second best into business, the rubbish into politics and the shits into law. Auberon Waugh
Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins. Tom Stoppard
I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls The Great Refusal ... The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth. W B Yeats
The news is staged, anticipated, reported, analyzed until all interest is wrung from it and abandoned for some new novelty. Thomas Griffith
Journalism may not dare too much. It can be gently humorous and ironic, very lightly touched by idiosyncrasy, but it must not repel readers by digging too deeply. This is especially true of its approach to language: the conventions are not questioned. Anthony Burgess
A would-be satirist, a hired buffoon,
A monthly scribbler of some low lampoon,
Condemn’d to drudge, the meanest of the mean,
And furbish falsehoods for a magazine. Lord Byron
The duty of journalists is to tell the truth. Journalism means you go back to the actual facts, you look at the documents, you discover what the record is, and you report it that way. Noam Chomsky
The moral ambiguity of journalism lies not in its texts but in the relationships out of which they arise – relationships that are invariably and inescapably lopsided. The ‘good’ characters in a piece of journalism are no less a product of the writer’s unholy power over another person than are the ‘bad’ ones ... The fact that the subject may be trying to manipulate the journalist – and none but the most otherworldly of subjects is above at least some manipulativeness – does not offset the journalist’s own sins against the libertarian spirit ... The not so wise, in their accustomed manner, choose to believe there is no problem and that they have solved it. Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer, 1990
What a monstrous thing that a University should teach Journalism! I thought that was only done at Oxford. This respect for the filthy multitude is ruining civilisation. Bertrand Russell
Report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied. William Shakespeare, Hamlet V ii 353
There’s no such thing at this date in the world’s history in America as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There’s not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never ever appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with, others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and if any of you would be foolish to write honest opinions, you would be out on the streets looking for another job … The business of journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon … We are the tools of rich men behind the scenes. John Swinton, American journalist New York Press Club 1953
The paparazzi are nothing but dogs of war. Catherine Deneuve, Daily Telegraph 20 February 1977, after death of Diana
The men with the muck-rakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck. Theodore Roosevelt, speech 14th April 1906
How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read. Karl Kraus, Aphorisms and More Aphorisms, 1909