It is impossible to read the daily press without being diverted from reality. You are full of enthusiasm for the eternal verities — life is worth living, and then out of sinful curiosity you open a newspaper. You are disillusioned and wrecked.
—Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) Singaporean Statesman
A reporter is always concerned with tomorrow. There’s nothing tangible of yesterday. All I can say I’ve done is agitate the air ten or fifteen minutes and then boom — it’s gone.
—Edward R. Murrow (1908–65) American Journalist, Radio Personality
It is a seldom proferred argument as to the advantages of a free press that it has a major function in keeping the government itself informed as to what the government is doing.
—Walter Cronkite (1916–2009) American Journalist, Television
Not only do we have a right to know, we have a duty to know what our Government is doing in our name. If there’s a criticism to be made today, it’s that the press isn’t doing enough to put the pressure on the government to provide information.
—Walter Cronkite (1916–2009) American Journalist, Television
People write negatives things, cause they feel that’s what sells. Good news to them, doesn’t sell.
—Michael Jackson (1958–2009) American Singer-Songwriter
Increasingly, the picture of our society as rendered in our media is illusionary and delusionary: disfigured, unreal, out of touch with reality, disconnected from the true context of our life. It is disfigured by celebrity, by celebrity worship, by gossip, by sensationalism, by denial of our societies.
—Carl Bernstein (1944–73) American Journalist, Writer
The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context. The pressure to compete, the fear somebody else will make the splash first, creates a frenzied environment in which a blizzard of information is presented and serious questions may not be raised.
—Carl Bernstein (1944–73) American Journalist, Writer
Reporters thrive on the world’s misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.
—Russell Baker (1925–2019) American Journalist, Humorist, Television Host
The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.
—Christopher Lasch (1932–94) American Historian, Moralist, Social Critic
It is a misfortune that necessity has induced men to accord greater license to this formidable engine, in order to obtain liberty, than can be borne with less important objects in view; for the press, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) American Novelist
It seems to me curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying, that it could occur to an association of human beings drawn together through need and chance and for profit into a company, an organ of journalism, to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of “honest journalism.”
—James Agee (1909–55) American Journalist, Poet, Screenwriter, Film Critic
Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.
—Robert Bresson (1907–99) French Film Director
The window to the world can be covered by a newspaper.
—Stanislaw Jerzy Lec (1909–1966) Polish Aphorist, Poet
There was a time when the reader of an unexciting newspaper would remark, ‘How dull is the world today!’ Nowadays he says, ‘What a dull newspaper!’
—Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American Historian, Academic, Attorney, Writer
If Thomas Edison invented electric light today, Dan Rather would report it on CBS News as, “Candle making industry threatened”.
—Newt Gingrich (b.1943) American Politician