"The way I had it is all gone now. The bars are gone, the drinkers, gone. There remain the smartest, healthiest newspeople in the history of the business. And they are so boring that they kill the business right in front of you."
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Jimmy Breslin, veteran US newspaper columnist, 1996
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"A newspaper is a device unable to discriminate between a bicycle
accident and the collapse of civilization."
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George Bernard Shaw, writer (1856-1950)
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“The life of the journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So is his style.”
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Stella Gibbons, 1932, Cold Comfort Farm, Foreword
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“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.”
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Humbert Wolfe, ‘The Uncelestial City’
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“I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.”
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Gandhi
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“There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.”
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Oscar Wilde
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“I’m with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.”
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Tom Stoppard
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“Some of the press who speak loudly about the freedom of the press are themselves the enemies of freedom. Countless people dare not say a thing because they know it will be picked up and made a song of by the press. That limits freedom.”
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Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury
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“The newspapers chronicle with degrading avidity the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details of the doings of people of absolutely no interest whatever.”
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Oscar Wilde
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“I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.”
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Aneurin Bevan
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“Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarist.”
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Oscar Wilde
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“Journalism consists largely in saying ‘Lord Jones died’ to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.”
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G. K. Chesterton
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“You should always believe all you read in the newspapers, as this makes them more interesting.”
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Rose Macaulay
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“Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.”
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Ben Hecht
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“If a man makes money by publishing a newspaper, by poisoning the wells of information, by feeding the people a daily spiritual death, he is the greatest criminal I can conceive.”
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Ferdinand Lassalle
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“The indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman – as eager to tell a lie as the truth.”
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Norman Mailer
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“To say that the newspaper press represents public opinion is to administer insult to intelligent men. It is the property of speculators, political leaders, large contractors and railway directors.”
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Karl Marx
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“The media is almost wholly owned by corporations and almost wholly funded by advertising. And that puts… limits on the kinds of things the news can challenge.”
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Jim Naureckas, editor
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“There are laws to protect the freedom of the press’s speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press.”
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Mark Twain
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“If a newspaper prints a sex crime, it is smut: but when the New York Times prints it, it is a sociological study.”
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Adolph S. Ochs
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“Journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.”
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Oscar Wilde, on the difference between journalism and literature
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“The newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.”
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The Goncourt Brothers, 1858
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“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.”
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Oscar Wilde
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“Freedom of the press in Britain means freedom to print such of the proprietor’s prejudices as the advertisers don’t object to.”
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Hannen Swaffer
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“Accuracy to a newspaper is what virtue is to a lady; but a newspaper can always print a retraction.”
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Adlai Stevenson
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“To be a working journalist one needs tact, aplomb, a wide general knowledge, an inventive mind, a faculty for quick action, a nose for news, an ear for scandal, and a mouth for drinking purposes. Also a pencil and some paper. The last three items are absolutely essential.”
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Lennie Lower, ‘Journalists are Born, Not Paid’
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“The newspapers! Sir, they are the most villainous, licentious, abominable, infernal – not that I ever read them – no – I make a rule never to look into a newspaper.”
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Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), The Critic
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“Newspapers, even, have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon.”
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Oscar Wilde (1865-1900) The Decay of Lying (1891)
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“I buy newspapers to make money to buy more newspapers to make money. As for editorial content, that’s the stuff you separate ads with.”
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Roy Thompson, Lord Thompson of Fleet, 1894-19
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"The former Prime Minister of Singapore, lee Kwan Yew, once said 'Journalists are people who separate the wheat from the chaff and publish the chaff.' This is an outrageous lie. Most journalists are way too lazy to separate the wheat from the chaff, so they either publish a photo of a supermodel in front of the wheat field, or write about some 'expert' who says the wheat is bad for you."
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Anon 2003
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"Media corporations are getting bigger and democracy is losing.
Journalism has become dumbed-down entertainment, we are deluged by
advertising, and elections have become scripted horseraces instead of
forums for meaningful debate."
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--Robert McChesney, US media scholar, July 2003
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"The awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America
by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at
ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to
the poorhouse."
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--Mark Twain, newspaperman, author (1835-1910)
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"As a group, journalists seem to have the thinnest skin when it comes
to criticism. That is changing slowly as we admit we are not perfect,
but there are still too many out there who see any criticism from
outside our sacred profession as an attack on our freedoms. For a batch
of communicators, we really do a pretty rotten job communicating what .
. . we are."
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-- Dan Kubiske, US journalist, 2003
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