Best 546 quotes in «journalism quotes» category

Any dictatorship takes a psychological toll on its subjects. If you are treated as an untrustworthy person-a potential slacker, drug addict, or thief-you may begin to feel less trust worthy yourself. If you are constantly reminded of your lowly position in the social hierarchy, whether by individual managers or by a plethora of impersonal rules, you begin to accept that unfortunate status. To draw for a moment from an entirely different corner of my life, that part of me still attached to the biological sciences, there is ample evidence that animals-rats and monkeys, for example-that are forced into a subordinate status within their social systems adapt their brain chemistry accordingly, becoming "depressed" in humanlike ways. Their behavior is anxious and withdrawn; the level of serotonin (the neurotransmitter boosted by some antidepressants) declines in their brains. And-what is especially relevant here-they avoid fighting even in self-defense. Humans are, of course, vastly more complicated; even in situations of extreme subordination, we can pump up our self-esteem with thoughts of our families, our religion, our hopes for the future. But as much as any other social animal, and more so than many, we depend for our self-image on the humans immediately around us-to the point of altering our perceptions of the world so as to fit in with theirs. My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers - the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being "reamed out" by managers - are part of what keeps wages low. If you're made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you're paid is what you are actually worth. It is hard to imagine any other function for workplace authoritarianism. Managers may truly believe that, without their unremitting efforts, all work would quickly grind to a halt. That is not my impression. While I encountered some cynics and plenty of people who had learned to budget their energy, I never met an actual slacker or, for that matter, a drug addict or thief. On the contrary, I was amazed and sometimes saddened by the pride people took in jobs that rewarded them so meagerly, either in wages or in recognition. Often, in fact, these people experienced management as an obstacle to getting the job done as it should be done.

A paparazzi is merely an extremely nosy nobody with a camera—and bills to pay.

As a journalist, in blindly, parroting these police reports, I am also leaving out a significant amount of social context- the context, and begging question all social institutions ought to consider, of whether it is actually advantageous to anyone to persecute nonviolent offenders with a medieval vigilance that feeds the very problems it hopes to fight, and to waste both police resources and valuable news time lending importance to something that is so obviously only “News” in the way that it highlights a particularly ugly facet of our criminal justice system, and by doing so, we lend it a power which is ethically not its due.

Art requires adequate time, to ponder, and space, to be put between the subject matter and the writer in order for opinions to remain untainted by the raucous, when opinion writers allow themselves this they avoid breaking the phantom limbs of their argument jumping to conclusions.

As an editor, you develop a B.S. meter—an internal warning system that signals caution about journalism that doesn't feel trustworthy. Sometimes it's a quote or incident that's too perfect —a feeling I always had when reading stories by Stephen Glass in the New Republic. Sometimes it's too many errors of fact, the overuse of anonymous sources, or signs that a reporter hasn't dealt fairly with people or evidence. And sometimes it's a combination of flaws that produces a ring of falsity, the whiff of a bad egg. There's no journalist who sets off my bullshit alarm like Ron Suskind.

(aspiring journalist to Carl Kolchak) 'Andy knows I want to be a reporter. Like you' This took me by surprise. 'Sallie, my dear, nobody wants to be a reporter like me.

As a journalist, I can also now understand his (Patrick O'Brian's)idea that the Q&A is not particularly civilized — let alone a sports media press scrum. The formats don’t necessarily further understanding between two people. It is not always true conversation — a discussion that unearths nuggets of insight. It too often seems like interviewers are running through a pre-fab checklist, looking for a Tweetable quote, trolling for a gaffe, or ticking off pre-conceived points like those on a medical checklist at the doctor’s office. It can feel invasive, like a trip to the proctologist — in front of an audience.

As touchy as cabaret performers and as stubborn as factory machinists....

As we are advocating for the freedom of the press all over the world, we should also ensure that the press men and women are not corrupt people in journalism. If not, the purpose of the press freedom is already defeated.

As a rule there is one thing you can always count on in our job — popularity. There are plenty of disadvantages I grant you, but you are liked and respected. Ring people up any hour of the day or night, butt into their houses uninvited make them answer a string of damn fool questions when they want to do something else — they like it. Always a smile and the best of everything for the gentlemen of the Press.

Bernstein was impressed by Sloan's thoughtfulness. Sloan seemed convinced that the President, whom he very much wanted to see re-elected, had known nothing of what happened before June 17; but he was as sure that Nixon had been ill-served by his surrogates before the bugging and had been put in increasing jeopardy by them ever since. Sloan believed that the prosecutors were honest men, determined to learn the truth, but there were obstacles they had been unable to overcome. He couldn't tell whether the FBI had been merely sloppy or under pressure to follow procedures that would impede an effective investigation. He believed the press was doing its job, but, in the absence of candor from the committee, it had reached unfair conclusions about some people. Sloan himself was a prime example. He was not bitter, just disillusioned. All he wanted now was to clean up his legal obligations - testimony in the trial and in the civil suit - and leave Washington forever. He was looking for a job in industry, a management position, but it was difficult. His name had been in the papers often. He would not work for the White House again even if asked to come back. He wished he were in Bernstein's place, wished he could write. Maybe then he could express what had been going through his mind. Not the cold, hard facts of Watergate necessarily - that wasn't really what was important. But what it was like for young men and women to come to Washington because they believed in something and then to be inside and see how things worked and watch their own ideals disintegrate.

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 ruminate on the fascinating aboriginal lore from the Australian outback or on the clandestine Israeli airlift of Ethiopian Jews out of southern Sudan. Readers preferred news that affected their own lives and they wanted it now. Leisure time was a luxury that fewer and fewer times subscribers enjoyed.

At a banquet given in his honour Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock once modestly attributed his success in life to the habit of "getting up earlier than the other fellow." But this was partly metaphorical, partly false and in case wholly relative for journalists are as a rule late risers.

Blogs are assailed on all sides, by the crushing economics of the business, dishonest sources, inhuman deadlines, pageview quotas, inaccurate information, greedy publishers, poor training, the demands of the audience, and so much more. These incentives are real, whether you're at The Huffington Post or some tiny blog. Taken individually, the resulting output is obvious: bad stories, incomplete stories, wrong stories, unimportant stories.

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 just this: the belief that one can and should separate facts from values. Facts, in this view, are assertions about the world open to independent validation. They stand beyond the distorting influences of any individual's personal preferences. Values, in this view, are an individual's conscious or unconscious preferences for what the world should be; they are seen as ultimately subjective and so without legitimate claim on other people. The belief in objectivity is a faith in "facts," a distrust of "values," and a commitment to their segregation.

But journalists thrive on not knowing exactly what the future holds. That's part of the excitement. Something interesting, something important, will happen somewhere, as sure as God made sour apples, and a good aggressive newspaper will become part of that something.

But Sir, he works with NT? Why would he tell us where to go? Aren’t we the competition?’ Satya asked. Nagesh shook his head gravely. ‘Actually the competition starts at the headquarters and is between the people who come on TV, and want to make sure their face is noticed by the rival channel, so that they get picked up for a higher salary. Between us camerapersons, there is no rivalry. We don’t do piece to cameras, we don’t come on TV. We do all the jostling to get you the best visuals to show on the channel. We just want to get the news to the viewers, no matter which logo is pasted on it.

But at the time, a mark of how far down the rabbit hole I had fallen, I saw it as just another tragedy I needed to stuff in the growing box in the back of my head. Shut the top and move on.

Call no man lucky until he is dead, but there have been moment of rare satisfaction in the often random and fragmented life of the radical freelance scribbler. I have lived to see Ronald Reagan called “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 blacked out an interview with Miloš Forman broadcast live on Moscow TV); to see Mao Zedong relegated like a despot of antiquity. I have also had the extraordinary pleasure of revisiting countries—Greece, Spain, Zimbabwe, and others—that were dictatorships or colonies when first I saw them. Other mini-Reichs have melted like dew, often bringing exiled and imprisoned friends blinking modestly and honorably into the glare. E pur si muove—it still moves, all right.

But when our elected officials and our political campaign become entirely untethered to reason and facts and analysis, when it doesn’t matter what's true and what's not, that makes it all but impossible for us to make good decisions on behalf of future generations. It threatens the values of respect and tolerance that we teach our children and that are the source of America’s strength. It frays the habits of the heart that underpin any civilized society -- because how we operate is not just based on laws, it's based on habits and customs and restraint and respect.

Carolyn M. Edy has broadened and deepened our understanding of women war correspondents. In so doing, she has expanded our appreciation of the scope and quality of their work and has corrected the many incomplete or incorrect conclusions of those who wrote the first drafts of history. These women served, and served well, their country and their profession, and it is good to have them restored to their proper place in history.

C'etait un jour de fete. Mais l'haine se repete. Laissez pas la peur dominer le coeur, Si on veut que l'amour soit vainqueur

(Cleveland) is a hard town to truly love.Live here long enough and you accept it as you do a cellmate in jail. It is a place where the promise of tomorrow far outweighs the reality of today.

Cherchez la femme" is good advice for investigative reporters. "Follow the money" is even better advice.

Children are no longer being parented, but are raised. Thats why they don't have morals, ethics,humanity and manners, because their parents neglected them. We now live in a society that doesnt care about right or wrong.

Commenting on print journalism at the Commenting on print journalism at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner: “Thanks to Obamacare, millions of Americans can visit a doctor’s office and see what a print magazine actually looks like.

By focusing exclusively on the events of the day, journalism all but severs the connection between time and eternity. It makes the world appear to be nothing but an endless jumble of events through which it is difficult, if not impossible, to discern anything beyond the relatively base motivations of lust, calculated self-interest, and the will to power. In short, journalism is not able to communicate wisdom.

College students often ask me why anyone should pay for professional journalism when there are plenty of people out there, like themselves, willing to write blogs for free? One answer is that government and corporations are investing millions of dollars into their professional communications campaigns. We deserve at least a few professionals working full-time to evaluate all this messaging and doing so with some level of expertise in ascertaining the truth. Young people are not alone in their skepticism about the value of professional journalism. A 2010 Gallup Poll showed Americans at an under 25 percent confidence in newspapers and television news—a record low. Pew Research shows faith in traditional news media spiking downward as Internet use spikes upward, and that a full 42 percent believe that news organizations hurt democracy. This is twice the percentage who believed that in the mid-1980s, before the proliferation of the net. As cultural philosopher Jürgen Habermas offered during his acceptance speech of a humanitarian award in 2006, "The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralized access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus." To be sure, the rise of citizen journalism brings us information that the mainstream media lacks either the budget for or fortitude to cover. Initial reports of damage during Hurricane Katrina came from bloggers and amateur videographers. However, these reports also inflated body counts and spread rumors about rape and violence in the Superdome that were later revealed not to have occurred.

Commenting acidly on a writer whom I perhaps too naively admired, my old classics teacher put on his best sneer to ask: 'Wouldn't you say, Hitchens, that his writing was somewhat journalistic?' This lofty schoolmaster employed my name sarcastically, and stressed the last term as if he meant it to sting, and it rankled even more than he had intended. Later on in life, I found that I still used to mutter and improve my long-meditated reply. Émile Zola—a journalist. Charles Dickens—a journalist. Thomas Paine—another journalist. Mark Twain. Rudyard Kipling. George Orwell—a journalist par excellence. Somewhere in my cortex was the idea to which Orwell himself once gave explicit shape: the idea that 'mere' writing of this sort could aspire to become an art, and that the word 'journalist'—like the ironic modern English usage of the word 'hack'—could lose its association with the trivial and the evanescent.

Computer hackers are the true journalists in the 21st Century. The old journalism is worse than dead. It is unreliable to the point that it is nothing more than a nuisance, an obstacle in the pursuit of truth.

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 system could be reformed.

Dean's eyes were studying me. "You have a way with words. What kind of writing do you want to do?" "Articles for Dad's paper, to start." "What do you want to write about?" I paused, suddenly uncertain about how much to share. Dean's eyes were reassuring. "When I know more, I'd like to write about deeper things.

Conventional wisdom in Galbraith's view must be simple, convenient, comfortable and comforting - though not necessarily true.

Covering politics like sports has created a self-reinforcing incentive structure that is not dissimilar to the one the ESPN’S SportsCenter has on the fundamentals of basketball. There is a long-running concern from basketball purists that the fundamentals of the game – passing, defense, and footwork – are eroding. The theory goes that players want to be like the stars they see on SportsCenter. You don’t get on SportsCenter by doing the nitty-gritty work of winning basketball games. The more extreme the play, the more dramatic the showboating and celebrating, the more likely to be a feature in a coveted highlight segment. The reward system benefits the opposite behavior most basketball coaches would like to see in their players. This is the SportsCenter effect.

* *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 then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.

Don't tell me about the Press. I know *exactly* who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they *ought* to run the country. The Times is read by the people who actually *do* run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by people who *own* the country. The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by *another* country. The Daily Telegraph is read by the people who think it is.' "Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?" "Sun readers don't care *who* runs the country - as long as she's got big tits.

Don't oppose mass surveillance for your own sake. Oppose it for the activists, lawyers, journalists and all of the other people our liberty relies on.

Everybody comes with prejudices, colored glasses on their eyes. Then they see everything colored according to their glasses. Yes, a few people come just like you, unprejudiced, without any idea gathered from yellow journalism.

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

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 your veranda admiring your absurd petunias?

Exposing corruption, brandishing truth.

Fear didn't suit me.

Elie Wiesel says that neutrality only helps the oppressor, never the victim. And I think you can apply that to journalism.

Finally, I applied to one of my roommates, more sagacious than the rest, for advice. Dave, I said. I’m broke and without prospects. I’ve blown my GI Bill on flying lessons. I can’t hide out here in college much longer. What should I do? Well, he said, at this crucial juncture you need to coldly appraise yourself. “I’ve only known you these few short years, but it strikes me you wouldn’t be good for anything important; I’d have to say you’re lazy, self-absorbed, glib and facetious, always ready to mock the suggestions of others, but never offering anything positive of your own. Intellectually shallow, no tap root anywhere, spiritually neutered, without feeling or compassion, unsteady of focus, lacking the fortitude for the long pull, with no fixed belief in anything.” I shook his hand and thanked him. The acuity of his analysis made my path clear. My only hope lay in daily journalism.

Fighting for truth is not a sentimental act based on emotion but an act of courage based on clarity.

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 wars. It does not mean manipulating a story into speaking your views. One might think it common sense but in the world of journalism a lot of what makes sense is lost to the lure of favouritism, greed and fame. Sadly, in this truth-telling business truth is hard to find.

Freedom of speech gives us the right to offend others, whereas freedom of thought gives them the choice as to whether or not to be offended.

Finally, for his sake and for that of everyone else alive, I hope he grows up in a world where science is acknowledged not as an ideology but as the best tool we have for understanding the universe, and where striving for the truth is recognized as the most noble quest humankind will ever undertake.

Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organised abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Showalter 1997) and the colonisation of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214). Summit (1994: 5) once described organised abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualisation or explanation. Explanations for serious or sadistic child sex offending have typically rested on psychiatric concepts of ‘paedophilia’ or particular psychological categories that have limited utility for the study of the cultures of sexual abuse that emerge in the families or institutions in which organised abuse takes pace. For those clinicians and researchers who take organised abuse seriously, their reliance upon individualistic rather than sociological explanations for child sexual abuse has left them unable to explain the emergence of coordinated, and often sadistic, multi—perpetrator sexual abuse in a range of contexts around the world.

Generals, on the average, are far less bellicose than journalists or patriotic housewives: They know the horrors of a war and they dislike any break in the routine