It’s like turning news into a sausage factory. Jeremy Paxman, Guardian 18th September 1997, re BBC’s proposed changes
Ill news hath wings, and with the wind doth go,
Comfort’s a cripple and comes ever slow. Michael Drayton, The Barons’ War, 1603
HERE IS THE NEWS,
Said the absolute speaker. Between him and us
A great gulf was fixed where pronunciation
Reigned tyrannically. Seamus Heaney, A Sofa in the Forties
People write negatives things, ’cause they feel that’s what sells. Good news to them doesn’t sell. Michael Jackson
No news is good news. Mid-17th century proverb
The wonderful news is that our Lord is a God of mercy, and He responds to repentance. Billy Graham
In the case of news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation. Voltaire
I’m interested to see what happens with Fox News and phone hacking. I really can't believe it just happens in Great Britain. Because really, who cares about just hacking phones over there? Michael Moore
Every night I watch the nightly news. It’s funded by the pharmaceutical companies. Virtually every ad is a drug ad. They get their say every night on the nightly news through advertising. Michael Moore
I’ve thought for the last decade or so, the only actual place raw truth was seeping through in newspapers was on the Comics Pages. They were able to pull off intelligent social comment, pure truths not found elsewhere in the news pages, and had the ability to make it all funny, entertaining, and pertinent. Elayne Boosler
There’s nothing good on the news. You’re not telling me CNN is all cats in trees, are you? Nothing can be that good if Piers Morgan is in it, you know what I mean? Noel Gallagher
I do not like to get the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons. Ogden Nash
He who laughs has not yet heard the bad news. Bertolt Brecht
Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news. John le Carré
The rise of a ubiquitous Internet, along with 24-hour news channels has, in some sense, had the opposite effect from what many might have hoped such free and open access to information would have had. It has instead provided free and open access, without the traditional media filters, to a barrage of disinformation. Lawrence M Krauss
We had news this morning of another successful atomic bomb being dropped on Nagasaki. These two heavy blows have fallen in quick succession upon the Japanese and there will be quite a little space before we intend to drop another. Henry L Stimson
I remember driving home one evening while they were reviewing the papers on the radio. One of the articles was about me separating from my wife. It's a weird thing to listen to a news report about the break-up of your marriage. Rory Bremner
News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising. Lord Northcliffe
News travels fast in places where nothing much ever happens. Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Arthur C Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Despite the variety and the differences, and however much we proclaim the contrary, what the media produce is neither spontaneous nor completely ‘free’: ‘news’ does not just happen, pictures and ideas do not merely spring from reality into our eyes and minds, truth is not directly available, we do not have unrestrained variety at our disposal.
For like all modes of communication, television, radio, and newspapers observe certain rules and conventions to get things across intelligibly, and it is these, often more than the reality being conveyed, that shape the material delivered by the media. Edward W Said
All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. George Orwell, Why I Write
News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising. George Orwell
Had it become easier to purposely manipulate the news? Orwell Rolls in His Grave, 2003
Starting with Ronald Reagan, the holy grail of deregulation has been sold to the public. But the news media has largely ignored its disastrous results. ibid.
We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late. Edward R Murrow
Unfortunately, mainstream news has become infotainment, sharing more in common with the entertainment industry than with traditional journalism. Gossip, characterizations and injections of drama are subtly infused with facts, altering the truth in a similar way to how dramatists twist true stories to create greater excitement. Lance Morcan, The Orphan Conspiracies
To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Henry David Thoreau, Walden
When a dog bites a man that is not news, but when a man bites a dog that is news. Charles Anderson Dana, American journalist, 1819-1897
The real news is bad news. Marshall McLuhan
Hard news really is hard. It sticks not in the craw but in the mind. It has an almost physical effect, causing fear, interest, laughter or shock. Andrew Marr
Where village statesmen talk’d with looks profound,
And news much older than their ale went round. Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, 1770
For evil news rides post, while good news baits. John Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1671
Ill news is wing’d with fate, and flies apace. John Dryden, Threnodia Augustalis l49
It is wonderful how much news there is when people write every day; if they wait for a month, there is nothing that seems worth telling. O Douglas aka Anna Buchan, 1877-1948, Penny Plain, 1920
The news isn’t there to tell you what happened. It’s there to tell you what it wants you to hear or what it thinks you want to hear. Joss Whedon, Astonishing X-Men II: Dangerous
News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news. A J Liebling
Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have. Richard Salent, former president CBS News
We are going to impose our agenda on the coverage by dealing with issues and subjects that we choose to deal with. Richard M Cohen, senior producer CBS political news
Politicians and the media have conspired to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public. At heart, politicians don’t believe that Americans can handle complex truths, and the news media, especially television news, basically agrees. Tom Fenton, CBS correspondent
Americans are too broadly under-informed to digest nuggets of information that seem to contradict what they know of the world ... Instead, news channels prefer to feed Americans a constant stream of simplified information, all of which fits what they already know. That way they don’t have to devote more air time or newsprint space to explanations or further investigations. Tom Fenton
Looking back, I still can’t believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of ‘experts’ all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more ‘shocking’ and ‘in-depth’ than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do. Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
The news is staged, anticipated, reported, analyzed until all interest is wrung from it and abandoned for some new novelty. Thomas Griffith
People value honest, fearless and above all independent news coverage that challenges the consensus. James Murdoch, McTaggart Lecture, Sky 2009
The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit. ibid.
To become informed and hold government accountable, the general public needs to obtain news that is comprehensive yet interesting and understandable, that conveys facts and outcomes, not cosmetic images and airy promises. But that is not what the public demands. Eric Alterman