Ralph Deakin Quotes

We in the media should be breaking the news and not making the news.

It’s a lot easier and cheaper to have thumbsuckers and pundits on television than it is to have reporters and news bureaus around the world.

I don’t care if you fuck the elephants, but if you do, you can’t cover the circus.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Well, news is anything that's interesting, that relates to what's happening in the world, what's happening in areas of the culture that would be of interest to your audience.

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.

Every newspaper lives by appealing to a particular public. It can only go ahead of its times if it carries its public with it. Success in journalism depends on understanding the public.

Many complaints have reached me from the army of the advantages conferred upon the enemy by the publication of intelligence from the seat of war, not only in letters from the correspondents of the English newspapers, but in letters written by officers to their friends at home in the spirit of confidential intimacy, and which those friends send to newspapers…

The first duty of the Press is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them to make them the common property of the nation.

From forty years' experience of the wretched guess-work of the newspapers of what is not done in the open daylight, and of their falsehood even as to that, I rarely think them worth reading, and almost never worth notice.

[Journalists are] more attentive to the minute hand of history than to the hour hand.

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

The newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct

What you say about the newspapers is very true ... They are indeed a curious compound of truth and untruth. I am so used to newspaper nonsense and attacks that I do not mind it in the least....

Find out what happened and put it in the paper

Newspapers are inherently inefficient and anger a lot of people.

I have tried to write about this matter without any improper bias, but of course we are all cowards about newspapers who tyrannize over us all.

There are those who blame the Press, but in this I think they are mistaken. The Press is such as the public demands, and the public demands bad newspapers because it has been badly educated.

To Eisenhower it seemed like the press was building up McCarthy.

If you're in the media, particularly newspapers, you are in the thick of all the interesting things that are going on in a community, and I can't imagine any other life that one would want to dedicate oneself to.

If 'The New York Times' didn't exist, CNN and MSNBC would be a test pattern. 'The Huffington Post' and everything else is predicated on 'The New York Times'. It's a closed circle of information from which Hillary Clinton got all her information - and her confidence.

I am interested in the press and what they do.

What a nice mob you press fellows are--wholesale scavengers!