REPORTER, n. A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words.
Journalism Quotes
The page is short, has no flagged entries, and is dominated by Oscar Wilde. John Pilger, Joseph Addison, Thomas Carlyle and W. T. Stead share the rest of the top. Wilde’s three sourced lines are the ones to know. In The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891) he says that in America the President reigns for four years and Journalism governs for ever and ever, and that the public has an insatiable curiosity to know everything except what is worth knowing. In The Critic as Artist (1891) he declines to defend modern journalism, which, he says, justifies its own existence by a Darwinian principle.
Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.
But I'll report it
Where senators shall mingle tears with smiles.
I fear three newspapers more than a hundred thousand bayonets.
When journalese was at its rifest the Ministry of Health was established - possibly a coincidence.
Behold the whole huge earth sent to me hebdomadally in a brown paper wrapper.
A Parliament speaking through reporters to Buncombe and the twenty-seven millions, mostly fools.
Ask how to live? Write, write, write, anything;
The world's a fine believing world, write news.
I don't really understand why journalism has to be so nasty, so sarcastic and intrusive.