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It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes. -
Oscar Wilde
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In America journalism is apt to be regarded as an extension of history: in Britain, as an extension of conversation. -
Anthony Sampson
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There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not. -
Oscar Wilde
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A professional whose job it is to explain to others what it personally does not understand. -
Lord Northcliffe
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I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity of motive), I am absolved of responsibility. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry. -
P J O'Rourke
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The press is like the air, a chartered libertine. -
William Pitt
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We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused -- in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible. On the other hand, the lightness of the artillery should not degenerate into pop-gunnery -- by which term we may designate the character of the greater portion of the newspaper press -- their sole legitimate object being the discussion of ephemeral matters in an ephemeral manner. -
Edgar Allan Poe
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Europe has a press that stresses opinions; America a press, radio, and television that emphasize news. -
James Reston
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Now he is a statesman, when what he really wants is to be what most reporters are, adult delinquents. -
Peggy Noonan
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I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon. -
Tom Stoppard
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Gonzo journalism is a style of ''reporting'' based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism -- and the best journalists have always known this. True gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it -- or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character. -
Hunter S Thompson
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If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people -- including me -- would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism. -
Hunter S Thompson
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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. -
Mark Twain
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If, for instance, they have heard something from the postman, they attribute it to ''a semi-official statement''; if they have fallen into conversation with a stranger at a bar, they can conscientiously describe him as ''a source that has hitherto proved unimpeachable.'' It is only when the journalist is reporting a whim of his own, and one to which he attaches minor importance, that he defines it as the opinion of ''well-informed circles.'' -
Evelyn Waugh
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I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth. -
Reinhold Niebuhr
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If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies. -
Karl Kraus
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