"Many monikers have been attached to me during the five decades of investigative reporting in Washington, but muckraker is the one I like the best... My mentor and partner Drew Pearson wore the label with pride, raking up things as they were in the constant hope that it would bring reform. Lest anyone think he wasn't proud of his calling, Drew entered into a side business selling manure generated by the cows at his gentleman's farm along the Potomac River. His mail-order advertisement hailed the manure as 'better than the column.'"
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Jack Anderson, Pulitzer Prize-winning
muckraking journalist (1922-2005)
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"Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar."
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Edward R. Murrow, US newsman (1908-1965)
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"People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news."
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A. J. Liebling, US journalist (1904-1963)
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“I like to do my principal research in bars, where people are more likely to tell the truth or, at least, lie less convincingly than they do in briefings and books.”
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P. J. O’Rourke
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“Journalism is, in fact, history on the run.”
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Thomas Griffith, editor
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“No self-respecting fish would be wrapped in a Murdoch newspaper.”
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Mike Royko, before resigning from the Chicago Sun-Times when the paper was sold to Rupert Murdoch.
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“It is a newspaper’s duty to print the news, and raise hell.”
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Wilbur F. Storey, Editor, Chicago Times
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“ We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”
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John Swinton, Editor, New York Sun
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“At certain times each year, we journalists do almost nothing except apply for the Pulitzers and several dozen other major prizes. During these times you could walk right into most newsrooms and commit a multiple axe murder naked, and it wouldn’t get reported in the paper because the reporters and editors would all be too busy filling out prize applications.”
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Dave Barry
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“I ain’t no lady. I’m a newspaperwoman.”
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Hazel Brannon Smith, journalist
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“We don’t write the truth. We write what people say. Sometimes we know it’s not the truth.”
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Wayne Phaneuf, editor
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“Newspapermen, as journalists used to be called, have long been charged with the sin of cynicism… a characterisation that many of us encourage to deflect attention from our far more widespread flaw, incorrigible sentimentalism.”
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Robert Manning, former editor, Atlantic
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“The press can only be a mirror – albeit a distorting mirror, according to its politics or the smallness of its purpose – but it rarely lies because it dare not.”
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James Cameron, British journalist
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“I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on the newspapers for information.”
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Christopher Hitchens, British journalist
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The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it.”
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Alexander Cockburn, British journalist
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There is now and will be a monster explosion in the means of disseminating material… but there’s still something to be said for sitting on the stoop reading a daily newspaper.”
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Chuck Ward, publisher
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“Journalists by definition are malcontents.”
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Jonathan Alter, editor, media critic
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“Unhappiness with the media is nothing new; the messenger has always caught hell for bringing bad news.”
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J. Herbert Altschull, journalist
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“We journalists don’t have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry.”
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P. J. O’Rourke
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“I don’t know. The editor did it when I was away.”
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Rupert Murdoch, when asked why he had allowed Page 3 (girls) to develop.
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“We work in the toy department.”
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Jimmy Cannon, on sports writers
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“Let’s face it, sports writers, we’re not hanging around with brain surgeons.”
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Jimmy Cannon
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“I think it well to remember that, when writing for the newspapers, we are writing for an elderly lady in Hastings who has two cats of which she is passionately fond. Unless our stuff can successfully compete for her interest with those cats, it is no good.”
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Willmott Lewis, ‘In Time of Trouble’
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“Today’s sorry newsrooms – silent, smokeless, boozeless, cursor-cursed funeral parlors – bear no resemblance to the divine hell-holes that persisted at newspapers and wire services until the mid-1970s. They were seas of grunge and debris, rackety with the clatter and jingle of teletypes and typewriters. Their mostly male, adrenaline-high, Masters of Slot and Spike rules a universe of controlled chaos, suspended in a perpetual stinking fog of cigarette smoke and worse.”
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Diane McLellan, opening a book review in the Wall Street Journal, May 14, 2001
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