May 22, 2005
JOURNALISM FROM THE LEFT, THE RIGHT, THE CENTER, THE DRUNK AND THE SOBER:
* "I have spent half my life trying to get away from journalism, but I am still mired in it--a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world full of misfits and drunkards and failures." -- Hunter S. Thompson
* "Facing the press is more difficult than bathing a leper." -- Mother Teresa
* "Somewhere along the line, many Americans relegated the media to a notch on the morality scale only slightly above that of child molesters." -- Gregory Kane, Baltimore Sun, 1997
* "A journalist is a reporter out of a job." -- Mark Twain
* "[Journalists are] a lower quality of human being, who'll do anything for a story. (...) At press awards they jeer, boo, fight, get pissed, and that's just the cream." -- Max Clifford, in an interview for the Radio Times
* "Everywhere I go, I'm asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them." -- Flannery O'Connor
* ; "In terms of ravenous egos, sensitive ambition and backstabbing, the atmosphere was actually diluted compared with the behavior of most foreign correspondents." -- Anthony Lloyd, The Times
* "To a newspaperman, a human being is an item with skin wrapped around it." -- Fred Allen
* "No wonder the newspaper is rotten. We need more drunkards." -- Actor Edward G. Robinson in "Five Star Final"
* "The press is the enemy" -- Richard Nixon
* "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
* "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." -- Jimmy Breslin, newspaper columnist, in a Sept. 1996 interview with Joan Smith for the San Francisco Examiner
* "[Journalism] is full of lying, cheating, drunken, cocaine-sniffing, unethical people. It's a wonderful profession." -- Piers Morgan, Daily Mirror
Posted by Vanderleun at May 22, 2005 07:12 AM from American Digest