39 Bad Journalism Quotes

Following is our list of bad journalism quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about .

Good Journalism Quotes

If that is what makes us liberals, so be it, just as long as in reporting the news we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism - that news reports must be fair, accurate and unbiased. — Walter Cronkite

Never awake me when you have good news to announce, because with good news nothing presses; but when you have bad news, arouse me immediately, for then there is not an instant to be lost. — Napoleon Bonaparte

And I believe that good journalism, good television, can make our world a better place. — Christiane Amanpour

You can't serve the public good without the truth as a bottom line. — Carl Bernstein

Writing is the flip side of sex - it's good only when it's over. — Hunter S. Thompson

If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Democracies succeed or fail based on their journalism. America is strong because its journalism is strong. That is how democracies work. They're only as good as the quality of the information that the public possesses and that is where we come in. — Scott Pelley

For most folks, no news is good news; for the press, good news is not news. — Gloria Borger

Thanks to my solid academic training, today I can write hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information which is how I got a good job in journalism. — Dave Barry

If journalism is good, it is controversial, by its nature. — Julian Assange

More Bad Journalism Quotes

Never awake me when you have good news to announce, because with good news nothing presses; but when you have bad news, arouse me immediately, for then there is not an instant to be lost. — Napoleon Bonaparte

My advice to would-be young authors is to read a lot, write a lot, and not worry about creating a finished product. Keeping a journal is not a bad idea either. — Kevin Henkes

It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers, and when powerful abusers are taken on, there's always a bad reaction. So we see that controversy, and we believe that is a good thing to engage in. — Julian Assange

Writing is for men who can think and feel, not mindless sensation seekers out of nightclubs and bars. But these are bad times. We are condemned to work with upstarts, clowns who no doubt got their training in a circus and then turned to journalism as the appropriate place to display their tricks. — Naguib Mahfouz

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism. — Graham Greene

It's too bad failures don't give seminars. Wouldn't that be valuable? If you meet a guy who has messed up his life for forty years, you've just got to say, 'John, if I bring my journal and promise to take good notes, would you spend a day with me?' — Jim Rohn

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination. — Graham Greene

I hope we never live to see the day when a thing is as bad as some of our newspapers make it. — Will Rogers

Investigative journalism and reporting has become much more dangerous. This is especially true for journalists and sources in National Security - but it has been getting pretty bad for beat reporters and small outlets doing local reporting, too. — Chelsea Manning

Statistics are somewhat like old medical journals, or like revolvers in newly opened mining districts. Most men rarely use them, and find it troublesome to preserve them so as to have them easy of access; but when they do want them, they want them badly. — John Shaw Billings

Frightening media messages...pervade the news business, which really ought to be called "the bad news business" for its preoccupation with disaster and destruction. In broadcast journalism, killing is almost always covered, while kindness is almost always ignored. The more alarming a news item is, the more attention it receives. — Michael Medved

Journalism is just a gun. It’s only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that’s all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world. — Warren Ellis

I'm saying that the WMD reporting was not consciously evil. It was bad journalism, even very bad journalism. — Daniel Okrent

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan. — Jacques Derrida

There seems to me now to be the notion that you send something to a journal or an agent and months go by. It seems to me like that is a new piece of bad manners. Probably. Generally I assume that anything that happens now happened to Adam and Eve also. — Lore Segal

My reporting in Africa wouldn't be political per se, but it's certainly the point of my reporting - and of a lot of other reporters I know: Human suffering is bad, and if reporting stories about it brings it to light and someone does something, that's part of the point of journalism. And it's a thin line between that and activism, and you have to be careful about that. — Sebastian Junger

The journals want the papers that make the sexiest claims. And scientists believe that the way you succeed is having splashy papers in Science or Nature - it's not bad for them if a paper turns out to be wrong, if it's gotten a lot of attention. — Michael Eisen

The one-two punch of New York media calling up every agency and corporate advertiser, keeping lists of advertisers who stayed on - " i.e., with Bill O'Reilly " - and those who fled, worked. As the publisher of a center-right magazine, this is disturbing. It sets a very bad precedent about the power of advertiser pressure and sends a message as an organization that you can essentially be blackmailed into getting rid of - " no kidding! — Rush Limbaugh

I have so much more compassion for journalists and the work that they have to do, in order to do the jobs that they have to do. I am much more in awe of and am celebratory of great journalism when I see it, and I'm much more critical of bad journalism, or crap masquerading as journalism. — Thomas Sadoski

I started to write because of my dream to become a filmmaker. I got to know about a film school in Paris and it was my goal to get there. To do that I knew I had to learn French. In order to practice I started to write journals in French. The effort I made to master what I regarded a bad thing - a language owned by the rich Moroccans - brought me the ability to write. — Abdellah Taia

I was never really satisfied with writing only text or with the way my texts looked when they were published. Most online journals have a pretty lame sense of typography - bad font, counter-intuitive margins and line spacing - that it makes me sour on my writing. — Masha Tupitsyn

Every industry, there are rogues and bad actors. There could be rogues and bad actors in journalism. Rogues and bad actors in medicine. Rogues and bad actors in the legal community. — Anthony Scaramucci

Conflict, when used as a device, makes for good television and bad journalism. — Aaron Sorkin

David [Halberstam] kept on doing what he did because he loved it. One of the obituaries I read quoted him as saying that he did journalism for the same reason the great Julius Irving did basketball: He loved doing it even when he was having a bad day. — Jonathan Yardley

Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art -- although it may possibly be very good journalism? — Sherwood Anderson

To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm's way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin. — Virginia Woolf

Being a journalist, I never feel bad talking to journalism students because it’s a grand, grand caper. You get to leave, go talk to strangers, ask them anything, come back, type up their stories, edit the tape. That’s not gonna retire your loans as quickly as it should, and it’s not going to turn you into a person who’s worried about what kind of car they should buy, but that’s kind of as it should be. I mean, it beats working. — David

We were badly held back not just by the technology, but by the culture of journalism. — Ezra Klein

Good stories flow like honey but bad stories stick in the craw [gullet]. What is a bad story? It's a story that cannot be absorbed in the first time of reading. It's a story that leaves questions unanswered. — Sayings

In Conclusion

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