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Newspapers and Journalism Quotes and Quotations
 Freedom of the press in Britain is freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to.  Newspapers have developed what might be called a vested interest in catastrophe. If they can spot a fight, they play up that fight. If they can uncover a tragedy, they will headline that tragedy. Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true, except for that rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge. I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it. Burke said there were three Estates in Parliament; but in the reporters' gallery yonder, there sat a fourth Estate more important than them all. Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Remember, son, many a good story has been ruined by over-verification. Don't be afraid to make a mistake, your readers might like it. One newspaper a day ought to be enough for anyone who still prefers to retain a little mental balance. Journalism is literature in a hurry. The sports page records people's accomplishments, the front page usually records nothing but man's failures. If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. 'Nothing in the paper today,' we sigh. Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once; a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow. He had been kicked in the head by a mule when young, and believed everything he read in the Sunday papers. An 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. The day you write to please everyone you no longer are in journalism. You are in show business. News is the first rough draft of history. It is a newspaper's duty to print the news and raise hell. What you see is news, what you know is background, what you feel is opinion. Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself. The first essence of journalism is to know what you want to know; the second, is to find out who will tell you. Today's reporter is forced to become an educator more concerned with explaining the news than with being first on the scene. A writer who takes up journalism abandons the slow tempo of literature for a faster one and the change will do him harm. By degrees the flippancy of journalism will become a habit and the pleasure of being paid on the nail and more especially of being praised on the nail, grow indispensable. 
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