quotations about newspapers
The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Alias Grace
The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Newspapers widen the sphere of our sympathies. They make their readers enter into the joys and sorrows of thousands of whom they would else know nothing, and for whom they would otherwise care nothing.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Newspapers ... chronicle, with degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details of the doings of people of absolutely no interest whatsoever.
OSCAR WILDE
The Critic as Artist
Newspapers which undertake to lead public sentiment generally fall into a ditch.
D. G. CROLY
"The Motive and Method of Journalism", Views and Interviews on Journalism
We need a daily paper edited and composed according to woman's own thoughts, and not as woman thinks a man wants her to think and write.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
remarks to the Woman's Auxiliary Congress of the Public Press Congress, May 23, 1893
The Press is the living jury of the Nation.
JAMES GORDON BENNETT
Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett and His Times
I worked for newspapers. I worked for newspapers at a time when I was not competent to do so. I reported inaccurately. I failed to get all the facts. I misspelled names. I garbled figures. I wasted copy paper. I pretended to know things I did not know. I pretended to understand things beyond my understanding. I oversimplified. I was superior to things I was inferior to. I misinterpreted things that took place before me. I over- and underinterpreted what took place before me. I suppressed news the management wanted suppressed. I invented news the management wanted invented. I faked stories. I failed to discover the truth. I colored the truth with fancy. I had no respect for the truth. I failed to heed the adage, you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. I put lies in the paper. I put private jokes in the paper. I wrote headlines containing double entendres. I wrote stories while drunk. I abused copy boys. I curried favor with advertisers. I accepted gifts from interested parties. I was servile with superiors. I was harsh with people who called on the telephone seeking information. I gloated over police photographs of sex crimes. I touched type when the makeups weren't looking. I took copy pencils home. I voted with management in Guild elections.
DONALD BARTHELME
"Brain Damage"
Modern man ... when he looks at his daily newspaper ... sees the events of the day refracted through a medium which colors them as effectively as the cosmology of the medieval scientist determined his view of the starry heavens. The newspaper is a man-made cosmos of the world of events around us at the time. For the average reader it is a construct with a set of significances which he no more thinks of examining than did his pious forbear of the thirteenth century--whom he pities for sitting in medieval darkness--think of questioning the cosmology.
RICHARD WEAVER
Ideas Have Consequences
It is necessary, if one would read aright, that he should read at least two newspapers, representing both sides of important subjects.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
It is remarkable, all that men can swallow. For a good ten minutes I read a newspaper. I allowed the spirit of an irresponsible man who chews and munches another's words in his mouth, and gives them out again undigested, to enter into me through my eyes.
HERMAN HESSE
Steppenwolf
Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.
CHARLES LAMB
"On Books and Reading", The Last Essays of Elia
If you aren't careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.
MALCOLM X
speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, December 13, 1964
On one side is the gigantic printing press, a miracle of fine articulation, which turns out the tabloid newspaper: on the other side are the contents of the tabloid itself, symbolically recording the most crude and elementary states of emotion.
LEWIS MUMFORD
Technics and Civilization
I like newspapers. Maybe the iPad is very modern and everything, and I'm not against it, but I like the physical contact. And the physical contact of metal and glass is not as sensuous as paper.
KARL LAGERFELD
"Media People: Q&A With Karl Lagerfeld", Women's Wear Daily, September 12, 2014
One of the objects of a newspaper is to understand popular feeling and to give expression to it; another is to arouse among the people certain desirable sentiments; and the third is fearlessly to expose popular defects.
MAHATMA GANDHI
Hind Swaraj
Turn to the press--it's teeming sheets survey,
Big with the wonders of each passing day;
Births, deaths, and weddings, forgeries, fires and wrecks,
Harangues and hailstones, brawls and broken necks.
CHARLES SPRAGUE
Curiosity: a poem, delivered at Cambridge, before the Phi Beta Kappa Society
Some newspapers are fit only to line the bottom of bird cages.
SPIRO AGNEW
The New York Times Book Review, 1970
The paper lasts a great deal longer when you read it upside-down than when you read it upside-up. Reading it upside-up you can go through a newspaper in about a week, but when you read it upside-down it lasts pretty nearly two months. I've been at work on that copy of the Gazette six weeks now and I've only got as far as the third column of the second page from the end. I don't suppose I'll reach the news on the first column of page one much before three weeks from next Tuesday. I think it's very wasteful to buy a fresh paper every day when by reading it upside-down backwards you can make the old one last two months.
JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
Mollie and the Unwiseman Abroad
The content of newspapers ... is not the product of chance. ... It is the result of precise psychological ... techniques. These techniques have as their goal the bringing to the individual of that which is indispensable for his satisfaction in the conditions in which the machine has placed him.
JACQUES ELLUL
The Technological Society