Claud Cockburn Quotes (9 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Claud Cockburn: 9 quotes 0 likes

Famous Claud Cockburn Quotes

“A newspaper is always a weapon in somebody's hands.”

Claud Cockburn

Page 220
A Discord of Trumpets (1956)

“Evidently there are plenty of people in journalism who have neither got what they liked nor quite grown to like what they get. They write pieces they do not much enjoy writing, for papers they totally despise, and the sad process ends by ruining their style and disintegrating their personality, two developments which in a writer cannot be separated, since his personality and style must progress or deteriorate together, like a married couple in a country where death is the only permissible divorce.”

Claud Cockburn

Pages 224-5
A Discord of Trumpets (1956)

“Since becoming a journalist I had often heard the advice to "believe nothing until it has been officially denied."”

Claud Cockburn

Page 190
A Discord of Trumpets (1956)

“Someone [on the staff of The Times] had invented a game – a competition with a small prize for the winner – to see who could write the dullest headline. It had to be a genuine headline, that is to say one which was actually printed in the next morning's newspaper. I won it only once with a headline which announced: "Small Earthquake in Chile. Not many dead."”

Claud Cockburn

Page 139
No such headline has ever been found in The Times at the period in question (the spring and summer of 1929), though one paragraph reads "An earthquake was felt yesterday between Illapel, to the north, and Talca, to the south, in Chile. No damage was done." (August 6, 1929). Source: The Quote... Unquote Newsletter (October, 2000) pp. 2-3.
A Discord of Trumpets (1956)