Quotes about journalist

A collection of quotes on the topic of journalist, people, doing, use.

Quotes about journalist

“You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.

But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there's
no occasion to.”

Humbert Wolfe (1885–1940) English poet

"Over the Fire", from The Uncelestial City (London: Victor Gollancz, 1930) p. 30.

God, Hope

“It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.”

George Orwell book Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia (1938)

War, Fight

“Western Journalists again and again systematically ignore serious Muslim attacks and rather focus on the Jews.”

Anders Behring Breivik (1979) Norwegian mass murderer

Norway attack suspect had anti-Muslim, pro-Israel views http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=230762/ Jerusalem Post (24 July 2011) Other

“He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great.”

Arthur Miller (1915–2005) playwright from the United States

Paris Review (Summer 1966)
Context: A playwright … is … the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great.

“In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Original (unused) preface http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/Orwell.html to Animal Farm (1945); as published in George Orwell: Some Materials for a Bibliography (1953) by Ian R. Willison Context: If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.

Country

“I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies — unless one counts journalists.”

George Orwell book Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Context: The fat Russian agent was cornering all the foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an Anarchist plot. I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies — unless one counts journalists.

Time, Personality

“Kennedy was not impressed by military objections. The Bay of Pigs had taught the President to distrust the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The first advice I’m going to give my successor,” he once said to his journalist friend Ben Bradlee, “is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.”4 During the missile crisis Kennedy courteously and consistently rejected the Joint Chiefs’ bellicose recommendations. “These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor,” he said. “If we…do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”5”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

Source: Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

Men, Feeling

“The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play.”

Oswald Spengler book The Decline of the West

The Decline of the West (1918, 1923)
Context: The press to-day is an army with carefully organized arms and branches, with journalists as officers, and readers as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and war-aims and operation-plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty.

“Hype is the awkward and desperate attempt to convince journalists that what you've made is worth the misery of having to review it.”

Federico Fellini (1920–1993) Italian filmmaker

"Hype"
I'm a Born Liar (2003)

“Here we allow absolute freedom to the journalist and entirely limit the artist. English public opinion, that is to say, tries to constrain and impede and warp the man who makes things that are beautiful in effect, and compels the journalist to retail things that are ugly, or disgusting, or revolting in fact, so that we have the most serious journalists in the world and the most indecent newspapers.”

Oscar Wilde book The Soul of Man under Socialism

The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891) Source: Wilde, Oscar, (1891 / 1912) The Soul of Man Under Socialism, London, Arthur L. Humphreys. Retrieved from University of California Libraries Archive.org https://archive.org 13 February 2018 https://archive.org/details/soulofmanunderso00wildiala

World, Beauty, Freedom

“It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes. Behind the barricade there may be much that is noble and heroic. But what is there behind the leading-article but prejudice, stupidity, cant, and twaddle? And when these four are joined together they make a terrible force, and constitute the new authority.”

Oscar Wilde book The Soul of Man under Socialism

Stupidity

“Going to where the silence is. That is the responsibility of a journalist: giving a voice to those who have been forgotten, forsaken, and beaten down by the powerful.”

Amy Goodman (1957) American broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter and author

The Exception to the Rulers written with David Goodman

Silence

“I hate the world and almost all the people in it. I hate the Labour Congress and the journalists who send men to be slaughtered, and the fathers who feel a smug pride when their sons are killed, and even the pacifists who keep saying human nature is essentially good, in spite of all the daily proofs to the contrary. I hate the planet and the human race – I am ashamed to belong to such a species.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Letter to Colette, December 28, 1916
1910s

Men, Hate, People, World

“The issue of press freedom is a constant concern in my interactions with the Chinese government. It’s an issue that I’ve raised with the President here in Burma. I’m pretty blunt and pretty frank about the fact that societies that repress journalists ultimately oppress people as well, and that if you want a society that is free and vibrant and successful, part of that formula is the free flow of information, of ideas, and that requires a free press. […] And we believe that when governments censor or control information, that ultimately that undermines not only the society, but it leads to eventual encroachments on individual rights as well. […] I brought up a basic principle that I stated earlier, which is that a free press is a foundation for any democracy. We rely on journalists to explain and describe the actions of our government. If the government controls the journalists, then it's very difficult for citizens to hold that government accountable.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Remarks by President Obama and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma in Joint Press Conference at Aung San Suu Kyi Residence in Rangoon, Burma on November 14, 2014 http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/11/14/remarks-president-obama-and-daw-aung-san-suu-kyi-burma-joint-press-confe 2014

People, Democracy, Idea, Freedom

“Why in the hell do journalists insist on coming up with a second rate Freudian evaluation on my lyrics when 90% of the time they've transcribed the lyrics incorrectly?”

Kurt Cobain book Journals

Source: Journals (2002), p. 190

Hell, Time

“What is bravery, and what is bravado? Journalists covering combat shoulder great responsibilities and face difficult choices. Sometimes they pay the ultimate price.”

Marie Colvin (1956–2012) American journalist, war reporter

Quoted in The Economist, 25 Feb 2012, p. 63

“I believe that I've been asked all possible questions. I, myself, if I were a journalist, would not know what to ask me.”

José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature

Interview with "O Globo", July 2009.

Question

“And it is only fair to state, with regard to modern journalists, that they always apologise to one in private for what they have written against one in public.”

Oscar Wilde book The Soul of Man under Socialism

The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

“I believe Africa’s progress will also depend on democracy, because Africans, like people everywhere, deserve the dignity of being in control of their own lives. We all know what the ingredients of real democracy are. They include free and fair elections, but also freedom of speech and the press, freedom of assembly. These rights are universal. […] And I have to proclaim, democracy is not just formal elections. When journalists are put behind bars for doing their jobs, or activists are threatened as governments crack down on civil society then you may have democracy in name, but not in substance. And I'm convinced that nations cannot realize the full promise of independence until they fully protect the rights of their people.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Remarks to the People of Africa (July 2015)

People, Democracy, Freedom, Universe

“In his sermons and books, Hinn has portrayed his childhood as that of a social outcast, handicapped by a severe stutter, who was nonetheless a stellar student. But when G. Richard Fisher and M. Kurt Goedelman, two journalists who write for Personal Freedom Outreach, looked into Hinn's youth, they found that both claims were untrue: nobody remembered Hinn stuttering, and he had dropped out of high school after the 11th grade.”

Benny Hinn (1952) American-Canadian evangelist

About

Books, Youth, School, Freedom

“I remember President Kennedy once stated… that the United States had the nuclear missile capacity to wipe out the Soviet Union two times over, while the Soviet Union had enough atomic weapons to wipe out the United States only once… When journalists asked me to comment… I said jokingly, "Yes, I know what Kennedy claims, and he's quite right. But I'm not complaining… We're satisfied to be able to finish off the United States first time round. Once is quite enough. What good does it do to annihilate a country twice? We're not a bloodthirsty people."”

Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971) First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

As quoted in Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (1974)

People, Time, Country

“There’s very little places, virtually no places obviously in the corporate media apparatus that you can tell the truth to challenge corporate tyranny and this US imperialist narrative of constant regime change all around the world... It’s a very dangerous and slippery slope that we’re on and I just think it’s time that we take a step back and actually fund the journalists that we want to see...”

Abby Martin (1984) American journalist

Quoted in Curating our reality: Investigative journalist Abby Martin takes aim at US media hegemony, RT.com https://www.rt.com/news/437721-abby-martin-telesur-sanctions/ (5 September 2018)

Time, Truth, Thinking, World

“Many US journalists and politicians acknowledge that climate change is the largest threat facing humanity, but few point to the fact that the US military is the largest institutional polluter, and emitter of carbon emissions, and every single climate treaty excludes their responsibility.”

Abby Martin (1984) American journalist

Interview https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/10/20/what-are-the-prospects-for-peace-an-interview-with-abby-martin/ with Counterpunch (2021)

Change

“When the devil wants to destroy talented writers, he makes them journalists. Thus he makes sure he has killed their creativity.”

Teodor Burnar

“I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

[Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, 2004, 1560255803, 2005298401, 56991027, 24964445M]
2000s, 2004

“So tell me, Mr. Science Journalist, do you still doubt the existence of miracles?""

""I just tole you. You're my miracle.”

Nicholas Sparks book True Believer

True Believer

Science

“I changed my mind. I don’t want to be an inveshtigative journalist anymore. I want to be a professional rum drinker.”

“There are people who do that,” Duff said. He’d barely sipped his rum.

“Really? What do you call them?”

“Alcoholics.”

Libba Bray (1964) American teen writer

Source: Beauty Queens

People, Alcohol, Change

“Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

“a writer must always tell the truth (unless he's a journalist)”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Source: The American Presidency

Truth

“We journalists make it a point to know very little about an extremely wide variety of topics; this is how we stay objective.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

“No honest journalist should be willing to describe himself or herself as 'embedded.' To say, 'I'm an embedded journalist' is to say, 'I'm a government Propagandist.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Source: Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World

“If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Personality

“It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it”

John Pilger (1939) Australian journalist

Source: John Pilger, 'Hidden Agendas', 1998

Understanding

“Philip Tetlock has just produced a study which suggests we should view expertise in political forecasting--by academics or intelligence analysts, independent pundits, journalists or institutional specialists--with the same skepticism that the well-informed now apply to stockmarket forecasting… It is the scientific spirit with which he tackled his project that is the most notable thing about his book, but the findings of his inquiry are important and, for both reasons, everyone seriously concerned with forecasting, political risk, strategic analysis and public policy debate would do well to read the book.”

Philip E. Tetlock (1954) American political science writer

Paul Monk, Australian Financial Review, cited in: Philip E. Tetlock. Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, 2015. Back cover.
About

Books, Intelligence, Study, Reading

“As citizen journalists and bloggers are becoming more important in news gathering and timely dissemination, mainstream media has found an important ally in the Fifth Estate.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2014

Time

“There is a revealing sardonic comment by Leopold Godowsky on a well-known statement of Paderewski, who once boasted, "When I don't practice for one day, my fingers know it; for two days, and my friends know it; for three days and the whole world knows it." Godowsky added: "On the fourth day, the critics hear about it." In any case, poets and novelists are generally better reporters of the general state of musical opinion than music journalists, who most often have an ax to grind, or, quite reasonably and justifiably, a more limited set of prejudices to broadcast.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 2 : How to Become Immortal

World, Music

“A world view which supports than they are by Jews (the liberals, the Wall Street people, journalists from the East Coast, lovers of black people, Hillary Clinton’s friends), we have struck quite a good deal. Trump and his friends see Israel as a forefront against the barbarians, and they are not exactly very observant.”

Yaron London (1940) Israeli journalist, actor and songwriter

Why Israel isn’t shocked by anti-Semites in White House (November 21, 2016)

People, World, Lovers, Support

“The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 6 (p. 27).

“I think humour can be a very lethal weapon. You make somebody a laughing stock and you kill him. But most journalists don't do it. They get angry, which doesn't serve the purpose.”

Khushwant Singh (1915–2014) Indian novelist and journalist

On Humour.
I Don't Know One Editor In India Who Is Well-Read

Thinking

“We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial - whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.”

Anna Politkovskaya (1958–2006) Russian journalist

As quoted in " Poisoned by Putin: The horror of Beslan was made still worse by the intimidation of Russia's servile media http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/09/russia.media" (9 September 2004), The Guardian, Guardian News and Media Limited.

Death, Dogs

“Aping Urbanity, Oozing with Vanity
Plump as a Manatee, Faking Humanity
Journalistic Calamity, Intellectual Inanity
Fox News Insanity, You're a profanity
Hannity”

John Cleese (1939) actor from England

"Ode To Sean Hannity", sent by Cleese to Keith Olbermann, and read publicly on Countdown with Keith Olbermann (8 August 2009) http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-US&brand=msnbc&vid=1211bdfc-2a9a-4e72-911f-e2d954bfe909

“How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.”

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) Czech playwright and publicist

Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)

War, Lie, World

“"The Doctrine of Fascism", June 1932. Quoted in Paul O'Brien, Mussolini in the First World War: The Journalist, the Soldier, the Fascist. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. Also in Peter N. Stearns, World History in Documents: A Comparative Reader. NYU Press, 2008.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

War, World, Quotes, History

“Some journalists are just motivated by their own sense of what they want to say or what they feel comfortable saying or writing about. In '77, I was on the cover of Time. The same week I had a big story in Newsweek. In one of the magazines it says I live alone, and the other magazine said I live with Jane Wagner. Unless you were so really adamantly out, and had made some declaration at some press conference, people back then didn't write about your relationship.”

Lily Tomlin (1939) American actress, comedian, writer, and producer

Metro Weekly interview (2006)

People, Feeling, Motivation, Sense

“There is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic "scientist", the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call "epistemic arrogance", this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 106

Fools

“As a journalist, my job is to be dispassionate. Suddenly to be the centre of a story and to be crying, it made me feel very insecure.”

Natasha Kaplinsky (1972) English newsreader and reporter

Her general reaction to learning about the fate of her family.
"Kaplinsky's tears over family secret", interview in Metro, Tue August 28 2007, p. 23

Feeling, Cry

“The main thing, if there is a power that the media has, it’s mostly because they represent the public in quite a direct relationship. They’re very populist in the sense that they are meant to be the public’s hired goons who go out, find information, collate it all, verify whether or not it’s true, and then signpost to the citizens that this is worth reading. And they make it in such a way that it’s interesting to read. So they are kind of spokespeople for the people. And in an interconnected age, they are definitely quicker to realize the way power has shifted. You find most journalists now are on all these social networks. They’re all about creating… they want a direct relationship with their audience, in a way that politicians have been very loathe to do.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Attributed, Chatham House Talk (September 28, 2011)

People, Age, Way, Sense

“Suffering from an evident complex of moral inferiority, a lot of journalists are interested in teaching the Pope how to do the Pope. Suffering from an evident complex of moral superiority, a lot of priests are interested in teaching journalists how to do journalism. But the worst of all are the journalist-priests.”

Leon Bertoletti (1971)

Complexes http://www.hicsuntleones.co.uk/2009/03/complexes.html, Hic Sunt Leones, 22/03/2009

Suffering

“Months later, Roger Cohen would write in The New York Time that preventing an attack on Banja Luka was "an acto of consummate Realpolitik" on our part, since letting the Federation [of Bosnia-Herzegovina] take the city would have "derailed" the peace process. Cohen, one of the most knowledgeable journalists to cover the was, misunderstood our motives in opposing an attack on Banja Luka. A true practitioner of Realpolitik would have encouraged the attack regardless of its human consequences. In fact, humanitarian concerns decided the case for me. Given the harsh behavior of Federation troops during the offensive, it seemed certain that the fall of Banja Luka would lead to forced evictions and random murders. I did not think the United States should contribute to the creation of new refugees and more human suffering in order to take a city that would have to be returned later. Revenge might be a central part of the ethos of the Balkans, but American policy could not be party of it. Our responsibility was to implement the American national interest, as best as we could determine it. But I am no longer certain we were right to oppose an attack on Banja Luka. Had we known then that the Bosnian Serbs would have been able to defy or ignore so many of the key political provisions of the peace agreement in 1996 and 1997, the negotiating team might not have opposed such an attack. However, even with American encouragement, it is by no means certain that an attack would have taken palce - or, if it had, that it would have been successful. Tuđman would have had to carry the burden of the attack, and the Serb lines were already stiffening. The Croatian Army had just taken heavy casualties on the Sarva. Furthermore, if it fell, Banja Luka would either have gone to the Muslims or been returned later to the Serbs, thus making it of dubious value to Tuđman. There was another intriguing factor in the equation - one of the few things that Milošević and Izetbegović had agreed on. Banja Luka, they both said, was the center of moderate, anti-Pale sentiment within the Bosnian Serb community, and should be built up in importance as a center of opposition to Pale. Izetbegovic himself was ambivalent about taking the city, and feared that if it fell, it would only add to Croat-Bosnian tensions.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 166-167

Fear, Peace, Behavior, Communication

“Journalists are bigger terrorists than terrorists themselves.”

Asif Ali Zardari (1955) politician in Pakistan

Zardari's frustration on Pakistani media during an address to businessmen from NWFP, Islamabad (2009-01-20).

“English: Only a total idiot would think that a major channel is working to inform the audience. The channel sells product, it must be packaged. CNN, for example, is a colossal ideological tool in the West. An excellent example is the situation around Yugoslavia. How effectively a very civilized part of humankind was brainwashed! The question is in approaches. If a consumer "grubs" stale bread, nobody will offer him poppy-seed buns. I'm an absolutely engaged person. By myself. I have certain political views. I'm not a journalist. I practice political propaganda. I am a commentator, and if one comments on events without having one's own position, that's an unhealthy symptom.”

Mikhail Leontyev (1958) Russian television pundit

Только полный идиот может думать, что крупный канал готов работать ради информирования зрителя. Канал продает продукт, его надо паковать. CNN, к примеру, является на Западе колоссальным идеологическим инструментом. Яркий пример тому - ситуация вокруг Югославии. Как эффектно промыли мозги очень цивилизованной части человечества! Вопрос в методах. Если потребитель "хавает" черствый хлеб, никто не будет давать ему булочки с маком. Я человек ангажированный абсолютно. Самим собой. У меня есть конкретные политические взгляды. Я не журналист. Я занимаюсь политической пропагандой. Я комментатор, и если человек комментирует события, не имея своей позиции, то это явление болезненное. Михаил Леонтьев: 'Придется стать придурком', Chelpress.ru (Mass Media of Chelyabinsk), 2000-06-29, 2007-03-25 http://www.chelpress.ru/newspapers/vecherka/archive/29-06-2000/9/2.DOC.shtml,

Question, Thinking, Parting, Personality

“I have been strongly influenced by the Mahabharata, discourses of the Buddha, Sri Aurobindo and Plato. My masters have been Vyasa, Buddha and Sri Aurobindo, as elucidated by Ram Swarup. … Paganism was a term of contempt invented by Christianity for people in the countryside who lived close to and in harmony with Nature, and whose ways of worship were spontaneous as opposed to the contrived though-categories constructed by Christianity’s city-based manipulators of human minds. In due course, the term was extended to cover all spiritually spontaneous culture of the world – Greek, Roman, Iranian, Indian, Chinese, native American. It became a respectable term for those who revolted against Christianity in the modern West. But it has yet to recover its spiritual dimension which Christianity had eclipsed. For me, Hinduism preserves ancient Paganism in all its dimensions. In that sense, I am a Pagan. The term "Polytheism' comes from Biblical discourse, which has the term 'theism' as its starting point. I have no use for these terms. They create confusion. I dwell in a different universe of discourse which starts with 'know thyself' and ends with the discovery, 'thou art that'…
I met her [Mother Theresa] briefly in Calcutta in 1954 or 1955 when she was unknown. I had gone to see an American journalist who was a friend and had fallen ill, when she came to his house asking for money for her charity set-up. The friend went inside to get some cash, leaving his five or six year old daughter in the drawing room. Teresa told her, "He is not your real father. Your real father is in heaven." The girl said, "He is very ill." Theresa commented, "If he dies, your father does not die. For your real father who is in heaven never 'dies."”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

The girl was in tears. Interview, The Observer. Date : February 22, 1997. http://sathyavaadi.tripod.com/truthisgod/Articles/goel.htm https://egregores.blogspot.com/2009/10/buddha-sri-aurobindo-and-plato.html https://egregores.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/hindus-and-pagans-a-return-to-the-time-of-the-gods/

Money, People, World, Art

“Foreign Spokesman Qin Gang let everyone act as journalists to ask him questions. Professor of Beijing United University Chen Delin got the mic first: “What principles do you follow when you answer questions from Chinese and foreign reporters?””

Qin Gang (1966) politician

Question, Universe

“Political science, by which I mean nothing more abstruse or academic than consideration of a foreign country as a country in its own right, seems to have been almost completely supplanted by a preoccupation with international relations. What is thought irrelevant to that side of things (often wrongly) is considered beneath notice. This can be seen by the reflexiveness with which journalists now contact I. R. professors or nuclear specialists for comment on North Korea’s motivations, party conferences, personality cult, etc — and the perfect confidence with which that comment is supplied.This is not to say that discussion of the current crisis does justice to international relations as a discipline. Usually it is conducted in a very simplistic, moralizing, America-centric fashion, with no apparent sense of history. Much of the stuff on Twitter or in op-ed pieces is all the more embarrassing for having been written from a presumed position of great intellectual superiority to Donald Trump. For all his unsuitedness to be president, the fellow is no more ignorant of North Korea’s political nature than most of his critics are.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, And Then What? (June 2018)

Justice, Confidence, History, Motivation

“Interviewer: You describe seemingly fantastic events in such minute detail that it gives them their own reality. Is this something you have picked up from journalism?
García Márquez: That's a journalistic trick which you can also apply to literature. If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants in the sky, people will probably believe you.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

Source: The Paris Review interview (1981), p. 324

People, Literature, Reality, Flying

“I think most journalists are pretty lazy, number one. A little lazy and also they're spoon-fed information, such as the weapons of mass destruction back in 2003…. you have these people who create a package of news, develop it as a story line, a scenario, and they find, as Mailer once said about the press, that they're like a donkey. You have to feed the donkey. The donkey every day has to eat. So [special interests] throw information at this damn animal that eats everything. Tin cans, garbage.”

Gay Talese (1932) American writer

Interview with Gay Talese, David Shankbone, Wikinews, October 27, 2007.

People, Thinking, Animals

“Russian activists and journalists who get enough death threats and take them sufficiently seriously to hire bodyguards are also usually careful about what they ingest. Soon after the chess champion Garry Kasparov quit the sport to go into politics full time, in 2004, he hired a team of eight bodyguards, who not only accompanied him everywhere but also carried drinking water and food for Kasparov to eat at meals shared in public. Three years ago, Kasparov told me that what he liked most about foreign travel was being able to shed his bodyguards for a while. A year after that, threats drove him to leave Russia permanently.”

Masha Gessen (1967) Russian-American journalist and activist

"Putin's Russia: Don't Walk, Don't Eat, and Don't Drink" http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/putins-russia-dont-walk-dont-eat-and-dont-drink?intcid=mod-yml (28 May 2015), The New Yorker.

Death, Food, Travel, Drink

“He who allows himself to be devoured will be devoured, and he will die before he has done his work. The man who has an ardent passion for work asks of others only what will help him. He shirks no work that ca be of use and that he ca do well, but he flies from conversations, meetings, talkfests, studios full of phrase-makers. Goethe even advises such a man to ignore daily events if he cannot do anything about them. If we spend an hour every morning informing ourselves about distant wars and another hour lamenting their possible consequences, when we are neither ministers, generals, nor journalists, nor anything, we render no service to our country and we waste the most irrecoverable of our possessions: our own short life.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Working

Life, War, Distant, Passion

“Golovinski: Mr. Rachkovsky, a Zionist congress met last year. I can simply fabricate a manifesto!
Rachkovsky: Not good enough…and that will take too much time!
I have a solution!
Here is an old book by someone named Maurice Joly. It appeared here in France in 1864… and four years ago our journalist Decyon tried to use it to attack Russia’s financial system.
Golovinski: The “Dialogue in hell between Machiavelli and Montesquie”!
Jolly’s book attacks Napoleon III’s government! It can be read as a plan for tyranny!
Rachkovsky: Exactly.
All you have to do is 'change this into a testament that emanates from the Jewish leaders…eh, Golovinski?
Golovinski: Ah, yes. A Jewish conspiracy! Yes, yes.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.59

Books, Hell, Appearance, Change

“We must express the view, based on our empirical observations, that a substantial number of journalists are ignorant, lazy, opinionated, and intellectually dishonest. The profession is heavily cluttered with aged hacks toiling through a miasma of mounting decrepitude and often alcoholism, and even more so with arrogant and abrasive youngsters who substitute 'commitment' for insight.”

Conrad Black (1944) Canadian-born newspaper publisher

Black, Conrad et al, "A Brief to the Special Senate Committee on the Mass Media from the Sherbrooke Record...", 1969 : Despite Black's involvement in press ownership, he heaped scorn on journalism

Alcohol, Age

“Are we just supposed to throw away our relationship with Saudi Arabia because they murdered a journalist?”

Eric Trump (1984) American businessman and philanthropist

Fox News https://twitter.com/LisPower1/status/1053321750543564801, October 2018, on the suspected murder of Jamal Khashoggi

“The journalist Enzo Biagi left the RAI out of free will … he did it for the money.”

Silvio Berlusconi (1936) Italian politician

As reported in "Veteran Italian journalist Enzo Biagi, 87, dies in Milan" in Herald Tribune (6 November 2007) http://web.archive.org/web/20081210192053/http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/11/06/europe/EU-GEN-Italy-Obit-Biagi.php; Enzo Biagi was one of the journalists that had to leave the RAI after the Editto Bulgaro of in 2002, in which he was accused by Berlusconi of making criminal use of television. 2007

Money

“Most of us know Ed Bradley from his 25 years of work on the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes, and his many interviews with world figures, celebrities and cultural icons. The men and the women who sat in the chair across from Bradley doing his 60 Minutes interviews were figures of importance, people to whom we should pay attention, and we could rely on Bradley to make sure that no skeleton in the darkest corner of his subject's closet was safe from the tenacious journalists.”

Ed Bradley (1941–2006) News correspondent

[Congressman Danny K. Davis, Congressional Record, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-2006-12-06/html/CREC-2006-12-06-pt2-PgH8798-3.htm, Honoring the Contributions and Life of Edward R. Bradley, H8798-H8800; Volume 152, Number 133, December 6, 2006, United States House of Representatives , printed by the United States Government Printing Office]
About

Women, Men, People, World

“If the West is genuinely interested in democracy then they will have to suffer hundreds of Al Jazeeras. There is Abu Dhabi television, Al-Arabiya (but that is under Saudi patronage), and there is a channel out of Lebanon (but they are politically close to Hezbollah). They are all very good as journalists but they are all part of the state.”

Samir Khader Iraqi journalist

Democracy, Suffering, Parting

“Terrorism' is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence - our violence - which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything that we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale. Terror, terror, terror, terror. It is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and news agency report, the soap-opera of the Devil, served up on prime-time or distilled in wearyingly dull and mendacious form by the right-wing 'commentators' of the America east coast or the Jerusalem Post or the intellectuals of Europe. Strike against Terror. Victory over Terror. War on Terror. Everlasting War on Terror. Rarely in history have soldiers and journalists and presidents and kings aligned themselves in such thoughtless, unquestioning ranks. In August 1914, the soldiers thought they would be home by Christmas. Today, we are fighting for ever. The war is eternal. The enemy is eternal, his face changing on our screens. Once he lived in Cairo and sported a moustache and nationalised the Suez Canal. Then he lived in Tripoli and wore a ridiculous military uniform and helped the IRA and bombed American bars in Berlin. Then he wore a Muslim Imam's gown and ate yoghurt in Tehran and planned Islamic revolution. Then he wore a white gown and lived in a cave in Afghanistan and then he wore another silly moustache and resided in a series of palaces around Baghdad. Terror, terror, terror. Finally, he wore a kuffiah headdress and outdated Soviet-style military fatigues, his name was Yassir Arafat, and he was the master of world terror and then a super-statesman and then again, a master of terror, linked by Israeli enemies to the terror-Meister of them all, the one who lived in the Afghan cave.”

Robert Fisk (1946) English writer and journalist

The Great War for Civilization (2005)

Hate, War, World, Home

“The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

D 20
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook D (1773-1775)

“In just one year in Bosnia, thirty of my colleagues died. There is a little Somme waiting for all innocent journalists.”

Robert Fisk (1946) English writer and journalist

Preface (page XXI)
The Great War for Civilization (2005)

Waiting

“In truth, modern life requires many people of talent and intelligence to run big institutions, including governments. Others resent their quality wherever they find it. They see it as oppressive. Then Donald Trump came before them and sneered at government leadership, in a style that had nothing to do with talent or intelligence…. To accomplish this, his followers needed only to mark a ballot. Soon he looked like the man they always needed. In the future, this strategy may well be called Trumpism. For now, American journalists call it populism.”

Robert Fulford (journalist) (1932) Canadian journalist

Until Trump, no openly racist candidate in modern times has reached such a height in U.S. politics (August 5, 2016)

Life, People, Truth, Intelligence

“To make you cry I’ll tell you about the twelve young impure men I saw executed at Dacca at the end of the Bangladesh war. They executed them on the field of Dacca stadium, with bayonet blows to the torso or abdomen, in the presence of twenty thousand faithful who applauded in the name of God from the bleachers. They thundered "Allah akbar, Allah akbar." Yes, I know: the ancient Romans, those ancient Romans of whom my culture is so proud, entertained themselves in the Coliseum by watching the deaths of Christians fed to the lions. I know, I know: in every country of Europe the Christians, those Christians whose contribution to the History of Thought I recognize despite my atheism, entertained themselves by watching the burning of heretics. But a lot of time has passed since then, we have become a little more civilized, and even the sons of Allah ought to have figured out by now that certain things are just not done. After the twelve impure young men they killed a little boy who had thrown himself at the executioners to save his brother who had been condemned to death. They smashed his head with their combat boots. And if you don’t believe it, well, reread my report or the reports of the French and German journalists who, horrified as I was, were there with me. Or better: look at the photographs that one of them took. Anyway this isn’t even what I want to underline. It’s that, at the conclusion of the slaughter, the twenty thousand faithful (many of whom were women) left the bleachers and went down on the field. Not as a disorganized mob, no. In an orderly manner, with solemnity. They slowly formed a line and, again in the name of God, walked over the cadavers. All the while thundering Allah–akbar, Allah–akbar. They destroyed them like the Twin Towers of New York. They reduced them to a bleeding carpet of smashed bones.”

Oriana Fallaci (1929–2006) Italian writer

Rage and the Pride">

Death, Women, Men, God

“The warrant did not give the power to rummage through the journalist’s files,” Leiderman said, adding “there is no indication of why all this information needed to be seized.”

Jay Leiderman (1971) lawyer

As stated in, Warrants and Computer Searches. http://jayleiderman.com/blog/jay-leiderman-quoted-part-6-warrants-and-computer-searches/
Variant: The warrant did not give the power to rummage through the journalist’s files,” Leiderman said, adding “there is no indication of why all this information needed to be seized.

“At a time of information overload, good journalists are more important then ever. They serve as the public's hired guns to collect information from various sources and challenge it for the purpose of distilling down what is important and true. They-signpost issues that are worthy of our attention. In the past when we bought newspapers we were paying for that particular newspaper with its content- a bundle of news and entertainment. In the digital age we're buying the carriage (e. g. the Internet access) and readers decide later what information they want to view over that carrier.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Page 70.
The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From the Information War, 1st Edition

Age, Time, Past

“The journalist is beautiful in the manner of people who spend an immense amount of money on personal maintenance. She has professionally refined pores and a four-hundred-dollar haircut, impeccable makeup and tastefully polished nails. When she smiles, Arthur is distracted by the unnatural whiteness of her teeth, although he’s been in Hollywood for years and should be used to it by now.”

Emily St. John Mandel book Station Eleven

Source: Station Eleven (2014), Chapter 13 (p. 72)

Money, People, Smile, Beauty

“Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.”

Kenneth Tynan (1927–1980) English theatre critic and writer

From Dada Manifesto 1918 (23 March 1918) by Tristan Tzara
Misattributed

Art, Understanding, Strong

“While in totalitarian regimes, government controls the media and criminalizes journalists, bloggers and human rights defenders who do not echo the State’s propaganda, in numerous democratic countries, the media are largely in private hands — too few hands. Often media are controlled by conglomerates responsive to corporations and advertisers who determine the content of news and other programmes, frequently disseminating disinformation or suppressing crucial information necessary for democratic discourse. Indeed, the media blackout on important issues constitutes a grave obstacle to democracy, since absent sufficient information and without free and pluralistic media, democracy is dysfunctional and the political process, including elections, becomes a mere formality — not an expression of the will of the people.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

2013 Source: United Nations General Assembly - Promotion of a democratic and equitable international order http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/IntOrder/A-68-284_en.pdf.

People, Democracy, Country

“I don’t know what my image is. I went to France to publicize Marvin’s Room, and one really smart young woman journalist said to me “You know, what I told people I was going to interview Meryl Streep, they were so excited…all ze woman in my office, they love you so much. But ze men - they are afraid of you.”

Meryl Streep (1949) American actress

Source: Liz Smith (1998). "The Meryl Streep Nobody Knows." Good Housekeeping, 227(3), September 1998, pp. 94-98; Cited in: Karen Hollinger The Actress: Hollywood Acting and the Female Star http://books.google.co.in/books?id=89W0QMDjA7gC&pg=PA71&dq=Meryl+Streep&hl=en#v=onepage&q=Meryl%20Streep&f=false, Taylor & Francis, 2006, p. 71

Love, Men, People

“You learn nothing if you carry with you a journalistic system of values, which is invented to save reporters from experience.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

"Cub Reporter" http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/autobio/3.htm#Cub%20Reporter An Autobiographical Novel (1991)

Learning

“Whatever analogy we choose, one thing is clear - any group with influence needs people outside that group who will criticise it. In the real world of politics and society, journalists do that - proper journalists who know what having principles means, who aim for objectivity while accepting that it is unattainable, and who are open about who pays them and who they work with.”

Bill Thompson (1960) English technology writer, born 1960

" Blog eats blog: The rise of the blogeoisie. http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/00000006DDA4.htm" by Bill Thompson, May 15, 2003.

People, World

“It's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing! In other countries people don't line up for food: the rich get the food and the poor starve to death.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

As quoted in "When Bernie Sanders Thought Castro and the Sandinistas Could Teach America a Lesson" http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/28/when-bernie-sanders-thought-castro-and-the-sandinistas-could-teach-america-a-lesson.html by Michael Moynihan, The Daily Beast (28 February 2016) 1980s

Death, People, Food, Country

“There seems to be a lot of love-hate relationships in Fiji today, between so many and the media, simply because there are so many negative reporting and a serious lack of understanding on journalists' part on working on reports or their stories. I am actually hoping for more from the Fiji media and the region, we need a whole lot more positive reporting.”

Asenaca Caucau Fijian politician

Opening address to the Pacific Regional Media Training Workshop on "Women's Issues, Women's Voices," January 2005

Love, Hate, Hope, Understanding

“From the point of view of the development of Marx’ s theories, his early journalistic writings are important for two main reasons. In his sharp attacks on the censorship law he spoke out unequivocally for the freedom of the Press, against the levelling effect of government restriction (‘ You don’ t expect a rose to smell like a violet; why then should the human spirit, the richest thing we have, exist only in a single form?’), and also expressed views concerning the whole nature of the state and the essence of freedom. Pointing out that the vagueness and ambiguity of the Press law placed arbitrary power in the hands of officials, Marx went on to argue that censorship was contrary not only to the purposes of the Press, but to tbe nature of the state as such.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

Source: Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume I, The Founders, pp. 120-1

Law, Nature, Freedom

“Sometimes it's good to be an outsider, especially as a journalist.”

Gay Talese (1932) American writer

In an interview with David L. Ulin to Los Angeles Times - Gay Talese talks with David L. Ulin http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2010/10/gay-talese-talks-with-david-l-ulin.html (October 15, 2010)

“A newspaper, as I'm sure you know, is a collection of supposedly true stories written down by writers who either saw them happen or talked to people who did. These writers are called journalists, and like telephone operators, butchers, ballerinas, and people who clean up after horses, journalists can sometimes make mistakes.”

Daniel Handler book The Vile Village

Lemony Snicket
The Vile Village (2001)

People, Horse

“It belongs to journalism — and to the millennial complex from which so many journalists and journalist intellectuals suffer in our day — that each new phase of Modernist art should be hailed as the start of a whole new epoch in art, marking a decisive break with all the customs and conventions of the past. Each time, a kind of art is expected so unlike all previous kinds of art, and so free from norms of practice or taste, that everybody, regardless of how informed or uninformed he happens to be, can have his say about it. And each time, this expectation has been disappointed, as the phase of Modernist art in question finally takes its place in the intelligible continuity of taste and tradition.Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is — among other things — continuity, and unthinkable without it. Lacking the past of art, and the need and compulsion to maintain its standards of excellence, Modernist art would lack both substance and justification.”

Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) American writer and artist

1960s, Modernist Painting (1960)

Art, Disappointment, Intelligence, Idea

“The fact that Fred and I were in no way similar - nor were we the best male dancers around never occurred to the public or the journalists who wrote about us…Fred and I got the cream of the publicity and naturally we were compared. And while I personally was proud of the comparison, because there was no-one to touch Fred when it came to "popular" dance, we felt that people, especially film critics at the time, should have made an attempt to differentiate between our two styles. Fred and I both got a bit edgy after our names were mentioned in the same breath. I was the Marlon Brando of dancers, and he the Cary Grant. My approach was completely different from his, and we wanted the world to realise this, and not lump us together like peas in a pod. If there was any resentment on our behalf, it certainly wasn't with each other, but with people who talked about two highly individual dancers as if they were one person. For a start, the sort of wardrobe I wore - blue jeans, sweatshirt, sneakers - Fred wouldn't have been caught dead in. Fred always looked immaculate in rehearsals, I was always in an old shirt. Fred's steps were small, neat, graceful and intimate - mine were ballet-oriented and very athletic. The two of us couldn't have been more different, yet the public insisted on thinking of us as rivals…I persuaded him to put on his dancing shoes again, and replace me in Easter Parade after I'd broken my ankle. If we'd been rivals, I certainly wouldn't have encouraged him to make a comeback.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Gene Kelly interviewed in Hirschhorn, Clive. Gene Kelly, A Biography. W.H Allen, London, 1984. p. 117. ISBN 0491031823.

People, World, Shoe, Way

“This is a typical journalistic statement: It is correct, but it is not the truth.”

Helmut Kohl (1930–2017) former chancellor of West Germany (1982-1990) and then the united Germany (1990-1998)

Das ist eine klassische journalistische Behauptung. Sie ist zwar richtig, aber sie ist nicht die Wahrheit.
ARD-Tagesthemen (February 22, 1994)

Truth

“Evil Angel' is an interesting song. It's actually to do with a journalist who, uh… I was in France at the time and quite delicate… and this guy basically seduced me in Strasbourg… he gave me a tour of the town and it was very romantic, and we did actually make out in the middle of this town square… and then I went and did the show and I never heard from him again. And I just felt incredibly used. I think a lot of it has to do with, once you get into this business, you do have to become some kind of a machine. You do have to be heartless at times and be able to plough through certain situations. I don't want to totally become that person, but it's good that I'm thinking about it.”

Rufus Wainwright (1973) American-Canadian singer-songwriter and composer

[July 22, 2011, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/article.html?ArticleID=2847, The Backpages Interview: Rufus Wainwright, Barney, Hoskyns, June 2, 2001, Rock's Backpages]

Angels, Guy, Business, Thinking

“Terry Pratchett and I met in February 1985, in a Chinese restaurant. I was a young journalist. He was a former journalist and Electricity Board PR, and a writer who had just published his second Discworld novel. I was the first journalist who had ever interviewed him.
I remember we made each other laugh a lot. We laughed at the same things. We became friends. It was easy.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

Good Omens: How Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote a book (2014)

“Grimaldi and a sixteen-year-old girl still at Hollywood High. He was a good journalist but he was going to die soon. At fifty he was on a bottle and a half of Californian brandy a day and four packs of Lucky Strike. His clothes smelt as though they were seeped in tobacco juice. His white forlock was stained with it…”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Earthly Powers (1980)

Girl, Clothes

“Suspecting that we would be accused of apologetics for the Khmer Rouge, Chomsky and I went to some pains to point out Khmer Rouge crimes and to stress that our purpose was to emphasize the discrepancy between available facts and media claims and to lay bare what we saw to be a propaganda campaign of selective indignation and benevolence. This effort was futile. With such a powerful propaganda bandwagon underway, from the very beginning the mass media were closed to oppositional voices on the issue, and any scepticism, even identification of outright lies, was treated with hostility and tabbed apologetics for the Khmer Rouge. Our crime was the very act of criticizing the workings of the propaganda system and its relation to US power and policy, instead of focusing attention on approved villainy, which could be assailed violently and ignorantly, without penalty. The issue was framed as a simple one: those for and against Pol Pot. […] I would estimate with some confidence that over 90 percent of the journalists who mentioned Chomsky's name in connection with Cambodia never looked at his original writings on the subject, but merely regurgitated a quickly adopted line. The critics who helped formulate the line also could hardly be bothered looking at the actual writings; the method was almost invariably the use of a few selected quotations taken out of context and embedded in a mass of sarcastic and violent denunciation.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Herman, “Pol Pot, Faurisson, and the Process of Derogation”, in Otero, Ed. (1994), Noam Chomsky: Critical Assessments, pp. 598-615.
1990s

Pain, Hostility, Penalty, Confidence

“Protocols:
Number 3, para. 5
All people are chained to heavy toil by poverty more firmly than ever they were chained by slavery and serfdom; from these, one way and another, they might free themselves, these could be settled with, but from want they will never get away. We have included in the constitution such rights as to the masses appear fictitious and not actual rights. All these so-called “People’s Rights” can exist only in idea, an idea which can never be realized in practical life. What is it to the proletariat laborer, bowed double over his heavy toil, crushed by his lot in life, if talkers get the right to babble, if journalists get the right to scribble nonsense side by side with good stuff, once the proletariat has no other profit out of the constitution save only those pitiful crumbs which we fling them from out table in return for their voting in favor of what we dictate, in favor of the men we place in power, the servants of our agenteur…. Republican Rights for a poor man are no more than a bitter piece of irony.
Graves: Aha!…A very obvious cop, almost word for word and a careful insertion of modern language such as “People’s Rights” and “Republican Rights.””

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.77

Life, Men, People, Way

“Reporter: President Jiang, do you think it’ll be good for Mr. Tung to serve another consecutive term?
Jiang: That’ll be good!
Reporter: Does Central Government support him too?
Jiang: Of course yes!
Reporter: Recently European Union has published a report saying that Beijing will affect and influence the nomocracy of Hong Kong in some ways. What's your response to that?
Jiang: Never heard before.
Reporter: It’s Chris Patten who said that.
Jiang: You the media should always remember that Seeing is believing. You should judge by yourself after you have received the news, got it? In case you say these things out of thin air for him, you may share the responsibility in some way.
Reporter: Now in such an early time, you said that you supported Mr. Tung, will that give people the impression that there is already an internal decision or imperial appointment on Mr. Tung?
Jiang: There's no such implication whatsoever. Everything should be done in accordance with Hong Kong Basic Law and the election laws.
Reporter: But…
Jiang: Replying what you've just asked me, I could have said "No comment." But you guys wouldn't be happy. So what should I do?
Reporter: Then Mr. Tung…
Jiang: I did not say that imperially appointing him to serve the next term. You asked me whether I support him or not, I support him. I can tell you explicitly.
Reporter: President Jiang…
Jiang: You all… My feeling is that you the media need to learn more. You are very familiar with the Western set of value, but after all you are too young. Do you understand what I mean? Let me tell you, I've been through hundreds of battles. I've seen a lot. Which country in the West have I not been to? Every time… You should know Mike Wallace in the US. He's way above you all. He and I talked cheerfully and humorously, which is why the media need to raise your intellectual level. Got it or not?
Reporter: President Jiang…
Jiang: I'm anxious for you all truly. You really… I… You guys are good at one thing. Wherever you go to all over the world, you always run faster than Western journalists. But the questions you keep asking - are too simple, sometimes naive. Understand or not? Got it or not?
Reporter: But could you say why you support Tung Chee-hwa?
Jiang: I'm very sorry. Today I am speaking to you as an elder, not as a journalist. I am not a journalist. But I've seen too much. I have this necessity to tell you a bit of my life experience.
Jiang: I just wanted to… Every time… In Chinese we have saying, "Make a fortune quietly." If I had said nothing, that would have been the best. But I thought I've seen all of you so enthusiastic. If I said nothing, that wouldn't be good. So, a moment ago you just insisted… In spreading the news, if your reports are inaccurate, you must be responsible. I did not say giving an imperial appointment. No such meaning. But you insisted on asking me whether I supported Mr. Tung or not. He is still the current Chief Executive. How could we not support the Chief Executive?
Reporter: But if we talk about his serving another term…
Jiang: To serve another term, you must follow the law of Hong Kong. Of course, our right to make the decision is also very important, since the Hong Kong SAR belongs to the Central Government of the People's Republic of China. When it gets to the right time, we'll let you know our decision. Understand what I say? You all. Don't provoke an uproar. Don't make it a flash-news saying that "It has already been imperially appointed" and criticize me. You all! Naive! I'm angry! I just offend you today! Your behavior like this is annoying!”

Jiang Zemin (1926) former General Secretary of the Communist Party of China

As quoted in "Former president Jiang Zemin unleashes a long tirade after a Hong Kong reporter asks him if Beijing had issued an "imperial order" to support Tung Chee-hwa in his bid to seek a second term as Chief Executive" https://www.facebook.com/shanghaiist/videos/10152728897091030 (October 2014), Facebook. 2000s, Hong Kong reporters make Jiang see red

Life, People, World, Law

“Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism… professor Noam Chomsky decides to leave that central question open. We have no more reason to credit Osama Bin Laden's claim of responsibility, he states, than we would have to believe Chomsky's own claim to have won the Boston Marathon… Nothing serious," as Chomsky puts it, "has been provided since.".. So is one to assume that he [Chomsky] has pored through the completed findings of the 9/11 Commission? Viewed any of the videos in which the 9/11 hijackers are seen in the company of Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri? Read the transcripts of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker"? Followed the journalistic investigations of Lawrence Wright, Peter Bergen, or John Burns, to name only some of the more salient? Acquainted himself with the proceedings of associated and ancillary investigations into the bombing of the USS Cole or indeed the first attempt to bring down the Twin Towers in the 1990s?”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2010s, 2011

World, Question, Reading, Personality

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

Claud Cockburn (1904–1981) Irish journalist

Page 190
A Discord of Trumpets (1956)

“The military mind tends to be conservative, realistic and historical. The civilian mind tends to be liberal, idealistic and Utopian. Journalists, obviously, are civilians, and they tend to distrust, and to suspect, the military’s motives.”

Mark Riebling (1963) American writer

Rumsfeld’s New Spy Unit (2002)

Motivation

“We’ve come up with ways to judge the quality of a product. The thing is that we’re just getting used to the idea that information is a product, and we have to come up with criteria on which to judge which information is worth paying attention to and taking seriously and which isn’t. So we have to think: is this information new? Is it relevant? Is it trustworthy? Can I verify it? Who’s the source? If you’re a journalist you’re used to doing this as your job, but that’s going to become increasingly necessary for people online, because they just get hit with so much information, and if they don’t want to just sit there, manipulated by all different kinds of propaganda, they have to start getting tooled up on how to be a savvy information consumer.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

International Journalism Festival http://www.journalismfestival.com/news/heather-brooke-antitrust-legislation-needed-to-keep-the-internet-free/ Interview with Fabio Chiusi, 12 April 2012. Attributed, In the Media

People, Way, Idea, Thinking

“Journalists told me that a talk show wouldn't work. Some told me I was going to get canceled before my first season was up. Before I did one show, they were, like 'Why do you want to do this? Do you know that 90 percent of talk shows don't get a second season? You're a model. People just see you as a model.”

Tyra Banks (1973) American model, author and television personality

"Tyra Banks: Success as Fashion Model and Businesswoman Make Her a Role Model as Well". (October 2006) Jet. p. 63.

People, Season

“When I left university I had two objectives; I wanted to write and I wanted to get married. The only way I could afford both was to get a job as a journalist. At that time, the National Union of Journalists was very powerful and would not allow the direct recruitment of journalists from college except under special circumstances. The Financial Times was deemed special and duly recruited a cadre of very bright young people. I joined the FT as part of that now celebrated intake and, as a result, found myself working on a business newspaper.”

Robert Heller (1932–2012) British magician

Interview: Robert Heller (2006)

People, Way, Business, Universe

“I first read his book Orthodoxy at a time when I was living on a sailboat in a quiet creek off the Potomac River right after college graduation. He seemed to view faith as a romantic adventure and the universe as a wild fairy tale. Chesterton looks at the world in the most beautiful way. He was also a journalist and philosopher who wrote an essay on “The Tyranny of Bad Journalism.” He died long before online video, but I think he would advocate new, creative methods to revolutionize the practice of journalism.”

James O'Keefe (1984) American conservative filmmaker

Changing the World by the Time He’s 30 http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/changing_the_world_by_the_time_hes_30 (March 31, 2010)

Books, World, Faith, Beauty

“Journalists have never before been able to tell stories so effectively, bouncing off each other, linking to each other (as the most generous and open-minded do), linking out, citing sources, allowing response – harnessing the best qualities of text, print, data, sound and visual media. If ever there was a route to building audience, trust and relevance, it is by embracing all the capabilities of this new world, not walling yourself away from them.”

Alan Rusbridger (1953) British newspaper editor

Source: 2010s, Does journalism exist? (2010), p. 7; Cited in: Janet Jones, ‎Lee Salter (2011) Digital Journalism. p. 88. Also cited in: Bob Franklin (2013) The future of journalism. p. 1969:

World

“Just released in 1994 is Christina Hoff Sommers’s landmark study, Who Stole Feminism?, which uses ingenious detective work to unmask the shocking fraud and propaganda of establishment feminism and the servility of American media and academe to Machiavellian feminist manipulation. This bracingly precise, fact-based book should be required reading for every journalist. Sommers is a courageous academic philosopher who was one of the very first to systematically critique current feminist ideology and who took tremendous abuse for it. … Sommers has done a great service for women and for feminism, whose fundamental precepts she has clarified and strengthened.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), p. xvi

Women, Books, Courage, Fraud