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[edit] Instructions
- Select a new quote attributed to a different individual than any of those currently quoted below.
- Add a new Quote to the next available subpage, using the layout format from the link above.
- Add a citation of where the quote was stated on that subpage below the quote.
- Update the "Random subpage" start and end values at the main portal page, to include the new Quote.
[edit] Quote list
Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/1
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Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones Dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/2
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It's all storytelling, you know. That's what journalism is all about.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/3
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Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/4
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Journalism is literature in a hurry.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/5
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Journalism consists in buying white paper at two cents a pound and selling it at ten cents a pound.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/6
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Writing for a newspaper is like running a revolutionary war; you go into battle not when you are ready but when action offers itself.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/7
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War correspondents ... see a great deal of the world. Our obligation is to pass it on to others.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/8
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A journalist is basically a chronicler, not an interpreter of events. Where else in society do you have the license to eavesdrop on so many different conversations as you have in journalism? Where else can you delve into the life of our times? I consider myself a fortunate man to have a forum for my curiosity.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/9
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Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/10
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A journalist is stimulated by a deadline; he writes worse when he has time.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/11
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I’ve always had standards about writing well. There is art in this business. There is potentially great art.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/12
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News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/13
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The Press is at once the eye and the ear and the tongue of the people. It is the visible speech, if not the voice, of the democracy. It is the phonograph of the world.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/14
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Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/15
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When journalese was at its rifest the Ministry of Health was established - possibly a coincidence.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/16
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Never forget that if you don't hit a newspaper reader between the eyes with your first sentence, there is no need of writing a second one.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/17
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Experience has shown that newspapers are one of the best means of directing opinion - of quieting feverish movements - of causing the lies and artificial rumours by which the enemies of the State may attempt to carry on their evil designs to vanish. In these public papers, instruction may descend from the Government to the people, or ascend from the people to the Government; the greater the freedom allowed, the more correctly may a judgment be formed upon the course of opinion - with so much the greater certainty will it act.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/18
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They used to say a man's life was a closed book. So it is but it's an open newspaper.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/19
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A reporter is always concerned with tomorrow. There's nothing tangible of yesterday. All I can say I've done is agitate the air ten or fifteen minutes and then boom - it's gone.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/20
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Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep saying it long enough it will be true.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/21
| Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. ... Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and the 'public's right to know'; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/22
| I don't so much mind that newspapers are dying — it's watching them commit suicide that pisses me off.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/23
| A newspaper is not an entity capable of sustaining a friendship. It is unprofessional in a career-journalist to foster trust except in the hope of future indiscretion. There is only one useful rule to be followed by a person whose fate it is to be interesting to such people. Stay away from them. They will kill you.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/24
The press and other news media rightly stand for openness in public discourse. But until they give equally firm support to openness in their own practices, their stance will be inconsistent and lend credence to charges of unfairness. It is now a stance that challenges every collective rationale for secrecy save the media's own. Yet the media serve commercial and partisan interests in addition to public ones; and media practices of secrecy, selective disclosure, and probing should not be exempt from scrutiny.
— Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation |
Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/25
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Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/26
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I suppose, in the end, we journalists try - or should try - to be the first impartial witnesses of history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: 'We didn't know - no one told us.'
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/27
| In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/28
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So much for Objective Journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here—not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/29
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Secretive power loathes journalists who do their job: who push back screens, peer behind façades, lift rocks. Opprobrium from on high is their badge of honour.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/30
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Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/31
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In Czechoslovakia there is no such thing as freedom of the press. In the United States there is no such thing as freedom from the press.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/32
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In our time, political speech and writing are the defence of the indefensible.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/33
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The freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/34
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The liberty of the press is essential to the security of freedom in a state: it ought not, therefore, to be restrained in this commonwealth.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/35
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Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/36
Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact, - very momentous to us in these times.
— Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History (1859) |
Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/37
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I still believe that if your aim is to change the world journalism is a more immediate, short-term weapon.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/38
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One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/39
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There is simply no telling in advance which of us will stumble upon true news and valuable thought. The dirty secret of our business is that we are not, after all, journalists, only scavengers.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/40
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In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the public. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/41
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The freedom of speech and of the press, which are secured by the First Amendment against abridgment by the United States, are among the fundamental personal rights and liberties which are secured to all persons by the Fourteenth Amendment against abridgment by a state. The safeguarding of these rights to the ends that men may speak as they think on matters vital to them and that falsehoods may be exposed through the processes of education and discussion is essential to free government. Those who won our independence had confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning and communication of ideas to discover and spread political and economic truth.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/42
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If somebody came from Mars to America and went around for months or years, and then you asked them who has the best jobs, they would say the journalists, because the journalists get to make momentary entries into people's lives when they are interesting, and get out when they cease to be interesting.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/43
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In America the president reigns for four years, and journalism governs forever and ever.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/44
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Journalists are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/45
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Provided I do not write about the government, religion, politics, morals, people in power, official institutions, the Opera, the other theatres, or about anybody attached to anything, I am free to print anything, subject to the inspection of two or three censors.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/46
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He who is without a newspaper is cut off from his species.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/47
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Our republic and its press will rise or fall together.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/48
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Let me make the newspapers and I care not what is preached in the pulpit or what is enacted in Congress.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/49
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They kill good trees to put out bad newspapers.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/50
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I look forward to these confrontations with the press to kind of balance up the nice and pleasant things that come to me as President.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/51
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I mean to work for 60 Minutes, and be able to go any place in the world, do any story, have enough time on the air, et cetera, there is simply no job in journalism like it. At the beginning, it was a dream. Even now, at the age of 84, I work with people who are half my age or less, and it is the draw of the story. If there is a good story going, why not be there?
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/52
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You go all over America and you see small papers that do really good jobs in their communities of reporting. The modern New York Times, the modern Washington Post, the modern Wall Street Journal are better papers than they were at the time of Watergate in most respects. But if you look at the rest of the field, ... real news based on the best obtainable version of the truth was becoming less and less a commodity, less and less a real part of our journalistic institutions.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/53
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The duty of journalists is to tell the truth. Journalism means you go back to the actual facts, you look at the documents, you discover what the record is, and you report it that way.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/54
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Journalists do not live by words alone, although sometimes they have to eat them.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/55
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If a newspaper prints a sex crime, it's smut, but when the New York Times prints it, it's a sociological study.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/56
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If Christ came back to earth now he would not attack the high priests, but the low journalists.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/57
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The proprietorship of newspapers has never been held to be journalism in the ordinary sense.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/58
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Controversy? You can't be any kind of reporter worthy of the name and avoid controversy completely. You can't be a good reporter and not be fairly regularly involved in some kind of controversy. And I don't think you can be a great reporter and avoid controversy very often, because one of the roles a good journalist plays is to tell the tough truths as well as the easy truths. And the tough truths will lead you to controversy, and even a search for the tough truths will cost you something. Please don't make this play or read as any complaint, it's trying to explain this goes with the territory if you're a journalist of integrity. That if you start out a journalist or if you reach a point in journalism where you say, "Listen, I'm just not going not touch anything that could possibly be controversial," then you ought to get out.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/59
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Grassroots journalism is part of the wider phenomenon of citizen-generated media - of a global conversation that is growing in strength, complexity, and power. When people can express themselves, they will. When they can do so with powerful yet inexpensive tools, they take to the new-media realm quickly. When they can reach a potentially global audience, they literally can change the world.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/60
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I don't want to be part of the story. I want to be an anonymous, quiet onlooker who tries to work out what the hell is happening - its not easy - and then tells other people about it. I don't like being a figure in the thing.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/61
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Today's serious nonfiction writer is important to society because from a solid background of social sciences, combined with the journalistic skills of a reporter, one moves beyond the reporter function to the front edge of our emerging society.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/62
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I do not think that journalism is a dying art. If anything, I believe it is more important than ever, and journalists worldwide are adapting to our modus operandi - to make public officials accountable to the people. The role of the journalist is indispensable, and as reviled as reporters may intermittently be, they are still highly respected when the pursue the truth and obtain positive results. It is my hope that future journalists will adhere to the true principles of the profession and understand that they play a vital role in helping to keep democracy and the exchange of free ideas alive at home and abroad.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/63
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Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to dramatic art, for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as possible. Thus it is that all journalists are, in the very nature of their calling, alarmists; and this is their way if giving interest to what they write. Herein they are like little dogs, if anything stirs, they immediately set up a shrill bark.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/64
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In the real world, the right thing never happens at the right place and at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/65
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The one quality that sets journalists apart from almost everyone is their intense belief in the value of journalism.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/66
Seek truth and report it.
Minimize harm.
Act independently.
Be accountable.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/67
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A newspaper is known by the columnists it keeps.
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Portal:Journalism/Selected quote/68
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For most of the history of American journalism, the independence and high quality of the American press have been tied ... to the commercial spirit and the need to offer his money's worth to a purchaser in the open market.
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[edit] Nominations
