Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Do something good and you won’t make page one. Find something bad and you might make page one.

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.

So many in the press turn gossip into gasoline and keep pouring it on the fire.

American newspapers disregard principles to seize on people, following them into their private lives and laying bare their weaknesses and their vices.

I think sometimes the recording of each act which has gone into the perpetration of some crime simply gives new suggestions to less fertile minds. I realize that crimes are "news," but I wonder if they could not be very briefly recorded, leaving out as much detail as possible and by doing so it might be easier for the arm of the law to proceed in unsolved crimes. The public is, of course, to blame, for apparently there is a curious fascination for many people in the reading of all these gruesome details. Is there no way that the public for its own protection can be induced to forego some of this particular type of reading matter?

Make the paper interesting.

Nothing is news until it has appeared in the columns of The Times.

The chief danger which threatens the influence and honor of the press is the tendency of its liberty to degenerate into license.

A laboring man now hardly goes to work until he has read the news.

[Commenting on Shays' Rebellion:] The way to prevent these regular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro' the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people.

Be it true or false, so it be news.

A labouring man ... read and study halfe his time, and then be at a loss to know what is true and what not. Thus the few have almost ruined the Libberty of the press.

I'd have to set my hair on fire to get on the news.

Newspapers always excite curiosity.

The function of a newspaper in a democracy is to stand as a sort of chronic opposition to the reigning quacks.

The Press is reducing everything that is noblest and impressive in modern life into terms of Press photographs and Press interviews. In fact they try to dominate everything. How can you concentrate on the solemnity of a scene when you have men with cameras in every direction, whose sole object is to get as near as they can to the central figures? How can you be impressed as much as you would like to be by what is said, when you know that all round you are people taking notes, and that the people who are speaking know that they are taking notes. One or two reporters, for the sake of preserving a record, would not be so bad. But they have to be dealt with in armies nowadays. The Press is destroying all romance, all solemnity, all majesty. They are as unscrupulous as they are vulgar.

Newspapers at that time did not necessarily try to flatter those in power. Rather, they wrote to please readers. I may sound evasive. but there certainly existed some kind of mechanism that aggravated the situation through subtle interactions between newspapers and the public. Readers were waiting for articles reporting the exploits of the victorious Imperial Forces, Newspapers indulged themselves in a competition to appear more patriotic and to see who could print the most articles urging and exalting victory. Newspaper companies cooperated through the dispatch of entertainers, calls for patriotic songs, campaigns for contributions to build more airplanes, and various other ways. The heavy responsibility that the newspapers bear is second only to that of the government.

The American might be defined as a newspaper-reading animal.

Many newspapers have become players as well as spectators in the political debate.

Don’t do or say things you would not like to see on the front page of the Washington Post.

In this Day the secrets of the earth are laid bare before the eyes of men. The pages of swiftly-appearing newspapers are indeed the mirror of the world. They reflect the deeds and the pursuits of diverse peoples and kindreds. They both reflect them and make them known. They are a mirror endowed with hearing, sight and speech. This is an amazing and potent phenomenon. However, it behooveth the writers thereof to be purged from the promptings of evil passions and desires and to be attired with the raiment of justice and equity. They should enquire into situations as much as possible and ascertain the facts, then set them down in writing.

The middle and upper classes having control of the means of distribution can generally succeed in smothering an organ which is offensive to them at birth by a perfectly well-known and organized system of boycotting, and in the few cases where they cannot effect this, can at least reduce its sale by three-fourths through the same means; in any case “respectable” and paying firms will decline to use it as an advertising medium, thereby cutting off its one chance of success as a financial speculation.

Freedom of the press, printing, publication and mass media shall be guaranteed. Censorship on newspapers is forbidden as well as notifying, suspending or cancelling them by administrative methods. In a state of emergency or in time of war a limited censorship may be imposed on the newspapers, publications and mass media in matters related to public safety or purposes of national security in accordance with the law.

Nobody believes an official spokesman. Everybody believes an unnamed source.

The sports pages record man’s accomplishments. The front pages record his failures.