quotations about the news media
Journalism is ... the recording of history while the facts are not all in.
THOMAS GRIFFETH
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attributed, Nieman Reports, 1958
Ill news is wing'd with fate, and flies apace.
JOHN DRYDEN
Threnodia Augustalis
Ill news, madam,
Are swallow-winged, but what's good
Walks on crutches.
PHILIP MASSINGER
Picture
Wars might come and go, but the seven o'clock news lives forever.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Money and Class in America
News travels fast in places where nothing much ever happens.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Ham on Rye
Good news stops to take breath on the road; bad news never requires it.
LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON
Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book
Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Dance Dance Dance
For a politician to complain about the press is like a ship's captain complaining about the sea.
ENOCH POWELL
The Guardian, December 1984
Only a newspaper! Quick read, quick lost, Who sums the treasure that it carries hence? Torn, trampled under feet, who counts thy cost, Star-eyed intelligence?
MARY CLEMMER AMES
The Journalist
Seminal changes in the news media over the past three decades have also helped create a more volatile political arena. During my last year in office, I joined with Ted Turner to celebrate the birth of CNN, and this new network provided global news coverage that was accurate, comprehensive, and objective--standards that were later partially sacrificed to meet intense competition from other channels. To gain viewers, the twenty-four-hour news channels have now come to rely on reporting that often dramatizes or exaggerates each reported rumor or fact. In addition, the more radical presentations of information or commentary have proven to be most popular, so radio and television programs, like political alignments, have tended toward extremes. An unfortunate result of the need for constant reporting--especially on Internet news outlets--has been the demise of hundreds of newspapers that have proved unable to compete, leaving major cities and towns with one merged journal, or, in some cases, none at all. The free and vigorous presentation of different opinion has been sacrificed to polarized uniformity.
JIMMY CARTER
White House Diary
Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.
A. J. LEIBLING
The Wayward Press
In the age of technology there is constant access to vast amounts of information. The basket overflows; people get overwhelmed; the eye of the storm is not so much what goes on in the world, it is the confusion of how to think, feel, digest, and react to what goes on.
CRISS JAMI
Venus in Arms
News told, rumors heard, truth implied, facts buried.
TOBA BETA
My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Where village statesmen talk'd with looks profound,
And news much older than their ale went round.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The Deserted Village
The newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
2001: A Space Odyssey
The greatest influence over content was necessity--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.
TOM RACHMAN
The Imperfectionists
News is the manna of a day.
M. GREEN
attributed, Day's Collacon
A raised eyebrow, an inflection of the voice, a caustic remark dropped in the middle of a broadcast can raise doubts in a million minds about the veracity of a public official or the wisdom of a governmental policy.
SPIRO AGNEW
speech the Midwest Republican Regional Conference in Des Moines, Iowa, November 13, 1969
Journalism is in fact history on the run. It is history written in time to be acted upon: thereby not only recording events but at times influencing them.
THOMAS GRIFFETH
attributed, Nieman Reports, 1958
A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
ARTHUR MILLER
London Observer