50 Journalism Quotes To Keep You Informed

Get informed with these eye-opening journalism quotes.

Journalists have held an essential place in our world.

They are the gatekeepers of how information is shared and understood.

Tell us your favorite journalism quote in the comment section below.

What are the benefits of reading these journalism quotes?

Unfortunately, disinformation and misinformation are two problems that journalists have to be accountable for.

The Pearson Institute recently did a poll and found that 95% of Americans believed misinformation is a threat.

Walter Cronkite once said, “We all have our likes and our dislikes. But… when we’re doing news — when we’re doing the front-page news, not the back page, — it is our duty to be sure that we do not permit our prejudices to show. That is simply basic journalism.”

For many years, journalists have been the conscience of modern democracy.

Without them, some of the most significant stories to impact our planet would have been swept under the rug.

Authentic journalism must battle:

• emotion-driven news
• alternative fact reporting
• taking things out of context

Be sure to also check out our Edward R. Murrow quotes from one of the most admired journalists in history.

Famous quotes on journalism

1. “Ratings don’t last. Good journalism does.” — Dan Rather

2. “Journalism keeps you planted in the earth.” — Ray Bradbury

3. “The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is.” — Warren Buffet

4. “Journalism is what we need to make democracy work.” — Walter Conkrite

5. “Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you’re at it.” — Horace Greeley

6. “I am grateful to journalism for waking me up to the realities of the world.” — Eduardo Galeano

7. “I think journalism is a great way to do public service, to have an impact on your community.” — Bob Schieffer

8. “There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.” — Walter Lippmann

9. “Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault.” — Henry Anatole Grunwald

10. “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” — Thomas Jefferson

11. “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” — Thomas Jefferson

12. “The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.” — Oscar Wilde

13. “It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions.” — G. K. Chesteron

Inspirational journalism quotes

14. “Journalism is literature in a hurry.” — Matthew Arnold

15. “Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.” — H. L. Mencken

16. “The freedom of the press works in such a way that there is not much freedom from it.” — Grace Kelly

17. “News is something someone wants suppressed. Everything else is just advertising.” — Lord Northcliff

18. “Journalism is a function, like going to the lavatory, best done at home and not talked about.” — Jeffrey Bernard

19. “A free press can be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom a press will never be anything but bad.” — Albert Camus

20. “Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.” — Cyril YRIL Connolly

21. “Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers another.” — G. K. Chesterton

22. “A news story should be like a mini skirt on a pretty woman. Long enough to cover the subject but short enough to be interesting.” — Anonymous

23. “Reporters are faced with the daily choice of painstakingly researching stories or writing whatever people tell them. Both approaches pay the same.” — Scott Adams

24. “My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action — even an opinion is a kind of action.” — Graham Greene

25. “The liberty of the press is a blessing when we are inclined to write against others, and a calamity when we find ourselves overborne by the multitude of our assailants.” — Samuel Johnson

26. “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.” — Noam Chomsky

27. “Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air.” — Henry Anatole Grunwald

Journalism quotes rules

28. “Journalism is merely history’s first draft.” — Geoffrey C. Ward

29. “Journalism is the only thinkable alternative to working.” — Jeffrey Bernard

30. “The press, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.” — James Fenimore Cooper

31. “Journalism is a career which demands the highest professionalism.” — Margaret Thatcher

32. “In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.” — Ellen Goodman

33. “If you consider the great journalists in history, you don’t see too many objective journalists on that list.” — Hunter S. Thompson

34. “We journalists are seducers, except it’s not sex we’re after (usually). It’s sound bites and quotes and information.” — Eric Weiner

35. “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

36. “If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.” — Norman Mailer

37. “How shall I speak thee, or thy power address Thou God of our idolatry, the Press…. Like Eden’s dead probationary tree, Knowledge of good and evil is from thee.” — William Cowper

38. “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” — Thomas Jefferson

39. “It is well to remember that freedom through the press is the thing that comes first. Most of us probably feel we couldn’t be free without newspapers, and that is the real reason we want the newspapers to be free.” — Edward R. Murrow

Journalism quotes for students

40. “Journalism is in fact history on the run.” — Thomas Griffith

41. “Fake news is a big thing in the field of Social Media Journalism.” — Fabrizio Moreira

42. “Fake news is cheap to produce. Genuine journalism is expensive.” — Toomas Hendrik Ilves

43. “The point of journalism is to hold people in positions of power accountable.” — Ana Kasparian

44. “I pine for a return to the type of old-school journalism and the tough newspapermen and women of the Thirties.” — Heather Brooke

45. “Journalism is about results. It’s about affecting your community or your society in the most progressive way.” — Anas Aremeyaw Anas

46. “Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It’s absolutely unavoidable.” — Marguerite Duras

47. “The upside of web-based journalism is that everybody gets a chance. The downside is that everybody gets a chance.” — Aaron Sorkin

48. “In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has.” —Mark Twain

49. “The lowest form of popular culture – lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives – has overrun real journalism.” — Carl Bernstein

50. “Journalism has changed tremendously because of the democratization of information. Anybody can put something up on the Internet. It’s harder and harder to find what the truth is.” — Robert Redford

Where do you get your news from?

Many people get their news where it is most convenient, via social media.

Social media journalism has carved a powerful lane for itself as a source of information for people.

We live in the information age.

It takes seconds for events from one part of the world to end up on the screens of millions of people on the opposite side.

More people get their news from a web-based source than from paper newspapers, which is good and bad.

However, the news is just as influential now as ever.

American playwright Aaron Sorkin shared, “The upside of web-based journalism is that everybody gets a chance. The downside is that everybody gets a chance.”

In an environment of propaganda and skewed news, the public needs access to integrity-based journalism.

The journalist who pursues facts and truth without bias is essential in our society.

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And if you enjoyed this article, you might like our Lewis Grizzard quotes from the famous journalist.