Rufus Sewell Quotes

Local television news, on both radio and television, is so appalling. Makes print journalism look like the greatest stuff ever written.

All of journalism is a shrinking art. So much of it is hype. The O.J. Simpson story is a landmark in the decline of journalism.

There aren't enough good journalists. There are too many who really weren't groomed to be reporters and, as a result, some of the reporting is shallow.

Henry Blodget does occasionally have a new idea. If you're making a point about aggregation or the emptiness of modern journalism, he's far from the best target. Try Huffpo - or Gawker writers whose souls have been corroded by irony.

Not all journalists are really journalists. They ask such stupid questions sometimes, especially the newer ones, and because... these people can't tell if you're joking around, you just can't have any sense of humour; you really can't.

Pick up any newspaper in the morning. Count the words in the lead sentences. There will be at least 25 in all of them: Guaranteed. The writers just want to tell you how many degrees they have from this college or that university.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

A good newspaper is never nearly good enough but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever.

The function of the New York Times is to enter the battlefield after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.

In journalism the gold standard has become punditry rather than reporting.

Newspapers are inherently inefficient and anger a lot of people.

I must be honest. I can only read so many paragraphs of a New York Times story before I puke.

The level of journalism in this country is just so pathetically poor, and I've, in a sense, gone over the top of them, which they don't like.

'The New York Times' is a great newspaper: it is also No Fun.

I don't want to paint everybody with the same broad brush. But I do think that the majority of folks now in the briefing room, that are going into journalism - they're not there for the facts and the pursuit of the truth.

Let's be clear: there was no golden age of journalism. The media has always been bad. And instead of improving, it spent a lot of time and energy making up its own myth.

I don't really like the way that journalism works in the UK anyway; it's all about getting the most shocking thing out of somebody and kind of twisting people's words, which isn't really journalism, as far as I'm concerned.

We have standards. Anybody with the kind of journalism experience and professionalism that you have displayed over these years can not work for my program.

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.

To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort, is not only quite as bad as Upton Sinclair says it is, but 10 times worse

I remember that, before John Lennon died, everyone was saying that Rolling Stone couldn't do good reporting anymore. But when he died, they wrote this amazing issue, as they should have about Lennon. They did that when Elvis died, too.

I got a letter one day from somebody saying, 'You're always criticizing the press. Why don't you talk about what Clay Felker is doing to your own paper [The Voice]?' And my 10-year-old son Tom, now with Williams & Connelly, put in a legal opinion, not - an opinion from the back of the car saying, 'You know why? What are you, afraid?' So I wrote the column. I - you know, - the column simply said that Felker is destroying this paper.

When people try to read between the lines - critics, they have a job. Their job is to make something bigger than it is.

I have so much more compassion for journalists and the work that they have to do, in order to do the jobs that they have to do. I am much more in awe of and am celebratory of great journalism when I see it, and I'm much more critical of bad journalism, or crap masquerading as journalism.

Speaking to the subject is the most overrated thing in journalism.