Journalism Quotes

I've got about 27 gigs right now. I've got radio, I've got television, I've got The Washington Post.

There are a lot of ways to practice the art of journalism, and one of them is to use your art like a hammer to destroy the right people — who are almost always your enemies, for one reason or another, and who usually deserve to be crippled, because they are wrong. This is a dangerous notion, and very few professional journalists will endorse it — calling it "vengeful" and "primitive" and "perverse" regardless of how often they might do the same thing themselves. "That kind of stuff is opinion," they say, "and the reader is cheated if it's not labelled as opinion." Well, maybe so. Maybe Tom Paine cheated his readers and Mark Twain was a devious fraud with no morals at all who used journalism for his own foul ends. And maybe H. L. Mencken should have been locked up for trying to pass off his opinions on gullible readers and normal "objective journalism." Mencken understood that politics — as used in journalism — was the art of controlling his environment, and he made no apologies for it. In my case, using what politely might be called "advocacy journalism," I've used reporting as a weapon to affect political situations that bear down on my environment.

I went to school at the University of Rhode Island and pursued a degree in journalism, which is a little bit ironic.

You are very familiar with Western ways, but you are too young. You go everywhere to follow the big news, but the questions you ask are too simple -- sometimes naive.

If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast.

I started attending community college when I was 14 or 15, just doing general education stuff like history and mathematics. Then I went on to California State University Long Beach to pursue a degree in journalism. And then I ended up dropping out to found Oculus.

I certainly am socialistic, but I am not a socialist

I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are.

I can explain this to you, but I cannot comprehend it for you.

I started trading around 1979, fresh out of college. In the early '90s, I started guesting for major news media.

I can't say I'm not grateful to have journalists writing about me as a genius. But I know it's not true. I'm not confused. I understand that success comes through a lot of failure and a lot of very embarrassing failure. People want to create the next Facebook, but they are too afraid to create the next Facemash.

When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.

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.

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

The newspapers! Sir, they are the most villainous — licentious — abominable — infernal — Not that I ever read them — no — I make it a rule never to look into a newspaper.

I've covered a lot of presidential campaigns.

The media increase the political nastiness while distancing voters from those clashes. Citizens become spectators. ­Headline-­driven news emphasizes the extremes, the fights, the hysteria, the sensational. Political reporters, trying to appear objective by quoting two opposing sides to almost every story, mostly sharpen the differences, slighting any centrist position.

Whatever may be said about the power of the press, it is undeniable that it can set the entire public thinking and talking about any topic ...

It's all storytelling, you know. That's what journalism is all about.

The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw in character.

A newspaper is a circulating library with high blood pressure.

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

I am one of the few men in public life who doesn't complain much about his treatment as the hands of the press. The press takes me to task every once in a while, but they have always been very kind, not attributing my hypocrisy to bad motives. They have always attributed it to a lack of mental capacity.

Women are the only correspondents to be depended on.

The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.