-----------------------------------------------------------------
* Thoughts For Today -- On Journalists & Journalism (part 3)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a
distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the
truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.
- Graham Greene

Journalism is organized gossip.
- Edward Eggleston

The lowest form of popular culture -- lack of information,
misinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most
people's lives -- has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary
Americans are being stuffed with garbage.
- Carl Bernstein

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one
world, and life seen in the newspapers another.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton

I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.
- Marguerite Duras

Journalist: a person without any ideas but with an ability to express
them; a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time he
has, the worse he writes.
- Karl Kraus

What a squalid and irresponsible little profession it is. Nothing
prepares you for how bad Fleet Street really is until it craps on you
from a great height.
- Ken Livingstone

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

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.
- Janet Malcolm

The real news is bad news.
- Marshall McLuhan

I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists
could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with
the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the
truth.
- Reinhold Niebuhr

In America journalism is apt to be regarded as an extension of history:
in Britain, as an extension of conversation.
- Anthony Sampson

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.
- Hunter S. Thompson

The facts fairly and honestly presented; truth will take care of itself.
- William Allen White

In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right
time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.
- Mark Twain