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NEWS --- NEWSPAPERS
NEWSPEAK

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NEWS

see "JOURNALISM" for related links


When a dog bites a man, that is not news,
because it happens so often. But if a man
bites a dog, that is news.
--John B. Bogart (1848-1921)
American journalist,
in F.M. O'Brien _The Story of the [New York] Sun_ [1918]

Oh to have a lodge in some vast wilderness.
Where rumour of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more.
--William Cowper (1731-1800)
English poet and hymnodist,
_The Task_, Book ii. "The Timepiece", Line 1.

That's the news from Lake Woebegon, where
all the women are strong, the men are good-
looking, and the children are above average.
--Garrison Keillor (1942- )
American writer and radio host.
His signature line, "A Prairie Home Companion," [1974-1987]

Do not wake me when you have good news to
communicate, with that there is no hurry. But
when you bring bad news, rouse me instantly,
for then there is not a moment to be lost.
--Napoleon I (1769-1821)
Emperor of France [1804-1815],
to his Secretary, quoted in Emerson, _Napoleon_

One Englishman is a story. Ten Frenchmen is a story. One
hundred Germans is a story. One thousand Indians is a story.
Nothing ever happens in Chile.
--attrib. London newsroom notice





NEWSPAPERS

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see "JOURNALISM" for related links


The evil that men do lives on the front pages of
greedy newspapers, but the good is oft interred
apathetically inside.
--Brooks Atkinson (1894—1984)
American journalist and critic.
_Once Around the Sun_ [1951], "December 11"

I ran the paper purely for propaganda,
and with no other purpose.
(Of the "Daily Express.")
--Lord Beaverbrook (1879—1964)
Canadian-born British newspaper proprietor and Conservative politician.
Evidence to Royal Commission on the Press [18 March 1948].

The advertisements in a newspaper are more
full of knowledge in respect to what is going
on in a state or community than the editorial
columns are.
--Henry Ward Beecher (1813—1887)
American Congregational minister;
[brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, son of Lyman Beecher.]

America is a country of inventors, and the
greatest of inventors are the newspaper men.
--Alexander Graham Bell (1847—1922)
Scottish-born American audiologist best
known as the inventor of the telephone [1876].
[Quote from 1917.]

I was thirty-seven when I went to work writing the
column. I was too old for a paper route, too young
for Social Security, and too tired for an affair.
--Erma Bombeck (1927—1996)
American humorist.

^

I read _The Times_ and if my name is not
in the obits I proceed to enjoy the day.
--attributed to Noλl Coward (1899-1973)
English playwright, actor, and composer
--_The Folio Book of Humorous Anecdotes_
Introduced by Edward Leeson [2005], "Death"

^

^

During the presidential election campaign of 1864, Henry J. Raymond wore two hats: He was chairman of the Republican National Committee and he was editor of the New York Times.

Early American newspaper publishers scoffed at the idea that they should hide their political prejudices under a cloak of objectivity. "To profess impartiality here," wrote William Cobbett in his Federalist newspaper, Porcupine's Gazette, "would be as absurd as to profess it in a war between virtue and vice, good and evil, happiness and misery." The motto of the Gazette of the United States, which began publication in 1789, was "He that is not for us is against us."

And a New Jersey printer wrote in 1798, "The times demand decision; there is a right and a wrong, and the printer, who under the specious name of impartiality jumbles both truth and falsehood into the same paper, is either doubtful of his own judgment or is governed by ulterior motives."

If ulterior motives played a part, however, it was to encourage early newspaper publishers to become deeply entrenched in politics. Circulation and advertising revenue couldn't support a newspaper, but government jobs or printing contracts could. When the political candidates they supported were elected, loyal editors expected pork or patronage, and their journals became "virtual branches of the government," wrote Eric Burns, author of "Infamous Scribblers."

The news pages — there was no such thing as an editorial — were unapologetically partisan, disdaining what Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune called "gagged, mincing neutrality."

[ . . . ]

Local and state politicians also made deals with newspaper publishers for smaller payoffs. In 1841, Wilbur F. Storey's South Bend, Ind., newspaper backed a candidate whose campaign was faltering. Storey ran a front-page story saying the opponent, a Whig, had died. Not until four days after the election, which the Whig won, did Storey publish a correction. Later, as editor of the Chicago Times, Storey advised a Civil War correspondent, "Telegraph fully all news you can get, and when there is no news, send rumors."

Early newspaper editors felt no obligation to write respectfully about the nation's leaders, and "debauched" was a good fighting word. "If ever a nation was debauched by a man, the American nation has been debauched by George Washington," declared the Philadelphia Aurora. The Columbian Centinel in Boston published a series of columns in 1800 called "The Jeffersoniad," exposing "the crooked character and principles of the Jacobin pretender to the presidency."

James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald wrote of Abraham Lincoln, "The idea that such a man as he should be the president of such a country as this is a very ridiculous joke."

Newspaper editors were at least as vituperative about their competitors. About the Aurora's editor, Benjamin Franklin Bache, William Cobbett wrote, "I should have no objection to the boys spitting on him as he goes along the street, if it were not that I think they would confer on him too much honour."

Mr. Storey called a competitor "a filthy and loathsome blackguard." The editor of the Gazette of the United States said James Callender, editor of the New York Journal, was a "scum of party filth and beggarly corruption worked into a form somewhat like a man." [ . . . ]

--Cynthia Crossen
"Dιjΰ Vu" column in _The Wall Street Journal_ [October 30, 2006]

^

Britain will not be involved in a European war
this year, or next year either.
--Front page headline _Daily Express_
(London newspaper) [30 September 1938]

They are so filthy and bestial that no honest
man would admit one into his house for a
water-closet doormat.
--Charles Dickens (1812—1870)
English novelist.
(On American newspapers.)

^

My father, normally a temperate man, so disliked the
[political views of the] Chicago Tribune that once,
when he had a flat tire in a snowstorm and the man
driving a Tribune truck offered to help him, my father
told the man to mind his own damn business and
bugger off. (My father used to tell this story as an
example of how stupid politics can make you.)
--Joseph Epstein
"The Last Tycoon?"
_The Wall Street Journal_ [9 April 2007]

^

A Bible and a newspaper in every house, a good school in
every district — all studied and appreciated as they merit —
are the principal support of virtue, morality and civil liberty.
--Benjamin Franklin (1706—1790)
American politician, inventor, and scientist.

If you can write a nation's stories, you needn't
worry about who makes its laws.
--George Gerbner (1919—2005)
American professor of mass communication.
_Bill Moyers' Journal_ "TV or Not TV" [23 April 1979]

^

Horace Greeley (1811-1872)
American jornalist and politician, founder and
editor of the "New York Tribune" [1841].

Traveling on a train in New York, Greeley
observed a fellow passenger reading the
"Sun". Always interested to discover what
made people buy the rival newspaper,
Greeley opened a conversation, at first
on general topics and then leading up
to the question, 'Why don't you read
the "Tribune"? It's a much more informative
paper than the "Sun".

I take the "Tribune" too,' replied the other
man. 'I use it to wipe my arse with.'

'Keep it up,' said Greeley, 'and eventually
you'll have more brains in your arse than
you have in your head.'

--_Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes_
edited by Clifton Fadiman and Andrι Bernard [2000 ed.]

^

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading
newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the
second hand of a clock.
--Ben Hecht (1893—1964)
American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter.
_A Child of the Century_ [1954], p.331

Editor: A person employed on a newspaper, whose business it is
to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff
is printed.
--Elbert Hubbard (1859—1915)
American editor, publisher, and author who
died in the sinking of the "Lusitania."
_The Roycroft Dictionary Concocted by Ali Baba
and the Bunch on Rainy Days_, p. 46 [1914]

-

The basis of our government being the opinion of
the people, the very first object should be to keep
that right; and were it left to me to decide whether
we should have a government without newspapers,
or newspapers without a government, I should not
hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.
--Thomas Jefferson (1743—1826)
American statesman and president [1801—1809].
Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington [16 January 1787].


To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper
should be conducted so as to be most useful, I should answer, 'by
restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.' Yet I fear such
a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth that a
suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the
nation of its benefits than is done by its abandoned prostitution
to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a
newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into
that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of
misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to
confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.
I really look with commiseration over the great body of my
fellow citizens who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief
that they have known something of what has been passing in
the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in
newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the
world as of the present, except that the real names of the day
are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected
from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has
been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion
of Europe to his will, etc., etc., but no details can be relied on. I
will add that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better
informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows
nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with
falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the
great facts, and the details are all false.
--Thomas Jefferson (1743—1826)
American statesman and president [1801—1809].
Letter to John Norvell [14 June 1807],
in Andrew Adgate Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh {ed.}
_The Writings of Thomas Jefferson_ [1905].


I read no newspaper now but Ritchie's [Richmond Enquirer], and in
that chiefly the advertisements, for they contain the only truths to be
relied on in a newspaper.
--Thomas Jefferson (1743—1826)
American statesman and president [1801—1809].
Letter to Nathaniel Macon [12 January 1819],
in Andrew Adgate Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh {ed.}
_The Writings of Thomas Jefferson_ [1905].

-

It [The New York Times] reads like it was
edited by two elderly sociologists, one of
whom has been dead for many years.
--Garrison Keillor (1942— )
American writer and radio host.
[In 1990.]

To read the front pages, you might conclude that
Americans are mostly out for themselves, venal,
grasping, and mean-spirited. The front pages have
room only for defense contractors who cheat and
politicians with their hands in the till. But you can't
travel the back roads very long without discovering
a multitude of gentle people doing good for others
with no expectation of gain or recognition. The
everyday kindness of the back roads more than
makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines.
--Charles Kuralt (1934—1997)
American journalist and broadcaster.

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We must get rid of our arrogant assumption that it
is the masses who can be led by the nose. As far
as I can make out, the shoe is on the other foot.

The only people who are really the dupes of their
favorite newspapers are the intelligentsia. It is
they who read leading articles: the poor read the
sporting news, which is mostly true.

--C.S. [Clive Staples] Lewis (1898—1963)
British scholar and novelist.
_Present Concerns: Essays by C. S. Lewis_ [1986], "Private Bates" [1944]


I never read the papers. Why does anyone? They're
nearly all lies, and one has to wade through such
reams of verbiage and "write up" to find out even
what they're saying.
--C.S. [Clive Staples] Lewis (1898—1963)
British scholar and novelist.
_Letters to an American Lady_ [1967], "26 October 1955"

-

We live in the midst of alarms; anxiety
beclouds the future; we expect some
new disaster with each newspaper we
read.
--Abraham Lincoln (1809—1865)
American Republican statesman, President [1861—1865].

^

In 2003 the "Modesto Bee" (CA) blundered wonderfully.
This is the correction which ran the following day:

"Gustav Mahler will not play with the Stockton Symphony this
season, as reported on Page E-5 on Sunday. He died in 1911."

^

Whenever I see a newspaper I think of the poor trees.
As trees they provide beauty, shade, and shelter.
But as paper all they provide is rubbish.
--Yehudi Menuhin (1916—1999)
American-born British violinist.
[Attributed 1982 remark.]

Exclusives aren't what they used to be. We tend to put
'exclusive' on everything just to annoy other papers.
I once put 'exclusive' on the weather by mistake.
--Piers Morgan (1965— )
British newspaper editor.
In "Independent" [14 March 1999].

If the newspapers of a country are filled with good
news, the jails will be filled with good people.
--Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927—2003)
American scholar and politician.

I don't know. The editor did it when I was away.
(When asked why he had allowed Page 3 of "The Sun" to develop.)
--Rupert Murdock (1931— )
Australian-born American publisher.
In "Guardian" [25 February 1994].

A journalist is a grumbler, a censurer, a giver of
advice, a regent of sovereigns, a tutor of nations.
Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared
than a thousand bayonets.
--Napoleon I (1769—1821)
Emperor of France [1804—1815].

The power of the press is very great, but
not so great as the power of suppress.
--Lord Northcliffe (1865—1922)
British newspaper proprietor.
Office message "Daily Mail" [1918],
in Reginald Rose & Geoffrey Harmsworth _Northcliffe_ [1959].

-

"It is a great paper. But it has one defect."

"What is that?"

"It never stands by its friends."

"A newspaper should have no friends," Pulitzer replied sharply.

"I think it should," the judge answered just as sharply.

"If that is your opinion," Pulitzer said, "I wouldn't make you one
of my trustees if you gave me a million dollars."

--Joseph Pulitzer (1847—1911)
Hungarian-born American newpaper publisher.
In a 1904 conversation with Morgan K. Stanley,
quoted in Don Carlos Seitz _Joseph Pulitzer_ [1924].

-

Newspapers are unable, seemingly to discriminate between
a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.
--George Bernard Shaw (1856—1950)
Irish comic dramatist, literary critic, Socialist
propagandist, and winner of the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1925 [he didn't accept it.]

The newspapers! Sir, they are the most villainous — licentious —
abominable — infernal — Not that I ever read them — no — I
make it a rule never to look into a newspaper.
--Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751—1816)
Anglo-Irish dramatist.
_The Critic_ [1779], act I, sc. 1

Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of
our party.
--Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (1879—1953),
Soviet Communist leader and head of the USSR from
the death of V. I. Lenin (1924) until his own death.
Speech [19 April 1923].

Accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a lady,
but a newspaper can always print a retraction.
--Adlai E. Stevenson (1900—1965)
American Democratic politician.

I always turn to the sports pages first, which
records people's accomplishments. The front
page has nothing but man's failures.
--Earl Warren (1891—1974)
American jurist, the 14th Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court [1953—1969].

There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism.
By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us
in touch with the ignorance of the community.
--Oscar Wilde (1854—1900)
Anglo-Irish dramatist and poet.

-

The duty of a newspaper is to comfort
the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
--anon.
(Also attributed to Finley Peter Dunne.)

If you want to know what is really going on
in the world, read the business section.
The rest is just so much gossip.
--anon.

New York Post headline: "Headless body found in topless bar."

MACARTHUR FLIES BACK TO FRONT
--Headline, Daily Express [October 1944]

Man shoots neighbor with machete.
--Miami Herald



NEWSPEAK

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see "POLITICAL CORRECTNESS"


Vertically challenged = short
Chronologically gifted = old
Terminally inconvenienced = dead
Involuntarily leisured = unemployed
Incompletely successful individual = a failure
Sobriety deprived = drunk
--Henry Beard and Chris Cerf,
_The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook_ [1992]

That's not a lie; it's a terminological inexactitude.
--Alexander Haig (1924- ) Secretary of State
[1983 television interview]. Winston Churchill had used
the phrase in a British election campaign in 1905.

-

The Wall Street Journal, reporting on the failure of
two (out of two) operational flight tests of the
cruise missile:

"The Air Force doesn't call the tests 'failures,' preferring to call
them 'partial successes' because the missiles worked 'flawlessly'
until they went off course."

--Erwin Knoll (1931-1994)
_No Comment_ [1984], "Look for the Silver Lining"

-

It would be insensitive to say Dennis Brown and
Ted Washington were fat when they reported to
[football training] camp. Let's just say they were
over-served.
--Scott Osler, "San Francisco Chronicle," [11 August 1993]

-

Yesterday's Seattle Times report on an act of arson committed by
members of the "Earth Liberation Front" is headlined "Activist group
claims responsibility for fires" the Everett Herald says "ELF activists
claim fires". Hamas militants are also routinely referred to as
"activists".

I've become a bit of an "activist". In addition to expressing opinions
on blogs, I write letters to editors and legislators, donate and raise
money for candidates and work an occasional phone bank. I've never
burned a building or shot at anybody. It would be nice if the media
could find a different word for those who do.

--Stephan Sharkansky,
http://www.thatliberalmedia.com/archives/001879.html#001879

-

Gentlemen. We are not retreating. We are merely
advancing in another direction.
--O.P.Smith (1893-1977). News Conference,
on the retreat of U.S. forces in North Korea [4 December 1950]


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