news is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress
What is news?
Famous quotes on journalism
The News Manual has definitions of what news is (run across the lower links on the correct), but hither nosotros share with yous another people's opinions on the field of study. Some of them are articulate and reasonable while others are deeply contemptuous. Some are given as practical communication afterwards years of professional experience while others are just witty. Just all are worth thinking most.
1 cursory disclaimer: With many quotes at that place are ongoing disputes about the precise wording, translation or attribution. One of the oldest quotes here is Voltaire'southward famous defense force of freedom of spoken language, yet arguments proceed about information technology to this 24-hour interval. While we have tried to give the most accurate version of each quote and its attribution, we always stand up to be corrected through the Contact Us page. Enjoy.
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What is news?
When a dog bites a human that is non news, but when a man bites a dog that is news.
Charles Anderson Dana, American journalist, 1819-1897
News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the balance is advertising.
Lord Northcliffe, British publisher 1865-1922
Well, news is anything that'southward interesting, that relates to what's happening in the world, what's happening in areas of the culture that would be of interest to your audition.
Kurt Loder, American journalist, b. 1945
Put information technology before them briefly and then they volition read information technology, conspicuously so they volition capeesh it, picturesquely and so they will remember it and, above all, accurately and then they will be guided by its light.
Joseph Pulitzer, American publisher, 1847-1911
News is annihilation that makes a reader say, `Gee Whiz'!
Arthur MacEwen, American editor,
No one says "Gee Whiz!" very much these days, of course, not even in America — both considering that expression has long since been supplanted by others more colourful and less printable, and considering our capacity for surprise has long since been dulled past a surfeit of sources.
Shashi Tharoor, Indian author and diplomat, b. 1956
What you run across is news, what you know is background, what you feel is opinion.
Lester Markel, American announcer, 1894-1977
It is hard news that catches readers. Features hold them.
Lord Northcliffe, British publisher 1865-1922
To a announcer, good news is oftentimes not news at all.
Phil Donahue, American entertainer, b. 1935
No news is practiced news.
Ludovic Halevy, French writer, 1834-1908
[News is] a beginning rough draft of history.
Philip 50. Graham, American publisher, 1915-1963
For most folks, no news is good news; for the printing, good news is not news.
Gloria Borger, American announcer, b. 1952
The existent news is bad news.
Marshall Mcluhan, Canadian communications theorist, 1911-1980
News is what a chap who doesn't intendance much about anything wants to read. And it'due south only news until he'southward read information technology. After that it's dead.
Evelyn Waugh, British author, 1903-1966
Expert stories period like honey only bad stories stick in the craw [gullet]. What is a bad story? It's a story that cannot exist absorbed in the first fourth dimension of reading. It's a story that leaves questions unanswered.
Arthur Christiansen, British newspaper editor, 1904-1963
Hard news actually is hard. It sticks not in the craw but in the mind. It has an almost physical upshot, causing fear, interest, laughter or shock.
Andrew Marr, British journalist, b. 1959
Never awake me when y'all take good news to denote, considering with good news nothing presses; just when you take bad news, arouse me immediately, for then there is non an instant to be lost.
Napoleon Bonaparte, French Emperor, 1769-1821
Journalism consists largely in saying Lord Jones died to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.
G.K. Chesterton, British writer, 1874-1936
News reports stand upward every bit people, and people wither into editorials. Clichés walk around on two legs while men are having theirs shot off.
Karl Kraus, Austrian satirist, 1874-1936
A primary passion is the love of news.
George Crabbe, British poet, 1754-1832
For a more humorous definition of news in America, go to:
http://www.jibjab.com/originals/what_we_call_the_news
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On journalists and journalism
There can be no higher police in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.
Walter Lippmann, American journalist, 1889-1974
People may expect too much of journalism. Not just practise they look it to be entertaining, they look information technology to be true.
Lewis H. Lapham, American publisher and editor, b. 1935
The day you write to please everyone you lot no longer are in journalism. You lot are in show concern.
[Possibly] Frank Miller, American cartoonist,
Newsmen believe that news is a tacitly acknowledged fourth branch of the federal system. This is why almost news about government sounds as if it were federally mandated - serious, beefy and blandly worthwhile, like a high-fiber diet set in type.
P. J. O'Rourke, American journalist, b. 1947
The conflict between the men who make and the men who report the news is every bit old as fourth dimension. News may be true, but information technology is not truth, and reporters and officials seldom see it the aforementioned mode. In the onetime days, the reporters or couriers of bad news were often put to the gallows; at present they are given the Pulitzer Prize, but the conflict goes on.
James Reston, American journalist, 1909-1995
The greatest felony in the news business today is to be backside, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context. The pressure to compete, the fearfulness somebody else will make the splash first, creates a frenzied environs in which a blizzard of information is presented and serious questions may not be raised.
Carl Bernstein, American journalist and author, b. 1944
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
Matthew Arnold, British poet and critic, 1822-1888
Literature is the art of writing something that will exist read twice; journalism what volition be grasped at once.
Cyril Connolly, British editor, 1903-1974
The truth is, "What is a journalist?" is ane of those questions for which there is no proper reply. The prehistory of modern journalism shows it has been a ragged and confusing trade all the way through.
Andrew Marr, British journalist, b. 1959
Journalism is oftentimes just the industrialisation of gossip.
Andrew Marr, British journalist, b. 1959
We cannot make good news out of bad practise.
Edward R. Murrow, American broadcast journalist, 1908-1965
I have a motto: My job is not to make upwardly anybody's mind simply to make the agony of conclusion making and so intense that you lot can escape just past thinking.
Fred Friendly, former president of CBS News, 1915–1998
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The media
Information technology is a paper's duty to print the news and raise hell.
Wilbur F. Storey, American editor, 1818-1884
A proficient newspaper is a nation talking to itself.
Arthur Miller, American writer, 1915-2005
[A newspaper] comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.
Attributed to Finley Peter Dunne, American writer, 1867-1936
There is a terrific disadvantage in not having the abrasive quality of the press applied to yous daily. Even though nosotros never like it, and even though we wish they didn't write it, and even though we disapprove, there isn't any doubtfulness that we could not do the task at all in a free society without a very, very active press.
John F. Kennedy, American President, 1917-1963
Television? No skilful will come of this device. The word is one-half Greek and one-half Latin.
[Attributed to] C.P. Scott, British announcer and publisher, 1846-1932
Television makes then much [money] at its worst that it can't afford to do its all-time.
Fred Friendly, former president of CBS News, 1915–1998
This musical instrument [dissemination] can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can exercise so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise information technology'southward nothing simply wires and lights in a box.
Edward R. Murrow, 1958, American broadcaster and announcer 1908-1965
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Truth and liberty
I detest what you lot write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write. ["Je déteste ce que vous écrivez, mais je donnerai ma vie pour que vous puissiez continuer à écrire."]
Attributed to Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), French philosopher, 1694-1778
The facts fairly and honestly presented; truth will take care of itself.
William Allen White American Editor, 1868-1944
A complimentary printing can be good or bad, simply, virtually certainly, without freedom a press will never be anything but bad.
Albert Camus, French philosopher and announcer, 1913-1960
News reports don't change the world. Only facts alter it, and those have already happened when we get the news.
Friedrich Durrenmatt, Swiss author, 1921-1990
News represents another class of advertising, not liberal propaganda.
Christopher Lasch, American historian, 1932- 1994
The basis of our governments existence the stance of the people, the very first object should be to go on that right; and were information technology left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should non hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
and ...
The only security of all is in a free printing. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.
Thomas Jefferson, American President, 1743-1826
Try to be conspicuously accurate in everything, pictures as well as text. Truth is not but stranger than fiction, it is more than interesting.
William Randolph Hearst, American publisher, 1863-1951
The bigger the data media, the less backbone and freedom they follow. Bigness means weakness.
Eric Sevareid, American announcer, 1912-1992
If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with expert people.
Daniel Moynihan, American politician and diplomat, 1927-2003
We should never overlook how far theories or ideologies that are different from our ain can stimulate. Information technology's not what'south like what we're thinking, merely what's different from what we're thinking which is going to drive thought forward.
Dame Gillian Beer, British academic, b. 1935
The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also truthful that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.
Edward R. Murrow, American broadcast journalist, 1908-1965
Journalists may spend our lives chasing that bubble chosen 'Truth' and never quite blast it down, but every solar day we can practise honesty.
David Ingram, The News Manual, 2008
In war, truth is the offset casualty.
Earliest attribution to Aeschylus, Greek dramatist, 525 BC - 456BC
Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is likewise late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a human, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a dr., who hath establish out an infallible medicine, subsequently the patient is dead.
Jonathan Swift, Anglo-Irish intellectual, 1667-1745
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Source: https://www.thenewsmanual.net/Resources/what_is_news_00.htm