People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.
A. J. Liebling (1904 - 1963)
To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely1 to feed the mind with canned chatter2.
Aleister Crowley (1875 - 1947)
Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's 'St. Matthew's Passion' on a ukulele.
Bagdikian's Observation
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.
Ben Hecht (1893 - 1964)
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism3 what will be read once.
Cyril Connolly (1903 - 1974), Enemies of Promise (1938)
USA Today has come out with a new survey - apparently4, three out of every four people make up 75% of the population.
David Letterman (1947 - )
Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff5, and to see that the chaff is printed.
Elbert Hubbard (1856 - 1915)
Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.
Frank Zappa (1940 - 1993), quoted in Linda Botts, "Loose Talk" (1980)
Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)
Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
Gore6 Vidal (1925 - )
All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose7. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.
H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
A newspaper consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not.
Henry Fielding (1707 - 1754)
It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.
Jerry Seinfeld (1954 - )
Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.
Jimmy Breslin
You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning... a place where you can simply experience and bring forth8 what you are and what you might be.
Joseph Campbell (1904 - 1987)
Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists9.
Norman Mailer (1923 - 2007), "Esquire", June 1960
But what is the difference between literature and journalism?
...Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all.
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900), The Critic as Artist, 1891
Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.
Russel Lynes
Newspapermen learn to call a murderer 'an alleged10 murderer' and the King of England 'the alleged King of England' to avoid libel suits.
Stephen Leacock (1869 - 1944)
Advertisements... contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826), Letter to Nathaniel Macon, January 12, 1819
I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely11 the happier for it.
Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826)
I read no newspaper now but Ritchie's, and in that chiefly the advertisements, for they contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826), Letter to Nathaniel Macon, January 12, 1819
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826)
