Journalistic Integrity Quotes

“If we uphold our journalistic integrity, we can navigate the challenging balance between being trusted informants and influencers with the power of the media. Is it not our first aim to avoid eroding public trust and violating ethical standards? ("News of the World")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“You know, that is one of the consequences of the weak sense of responsibility of the press. The press does not feel responsibility for its judgments. It makes judgments and attaches labels with the greatest of ease. Mediocre journalists simply make headlines of their conclusions, which suddenly become generally accepted.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West

“Some newspaper stories can be presented in entertaining ways; they can make you laugh; they can make you weep. But they are not charged with providing exaltation or fantasy. In the most entertained nation in the history of the world, newspapers exist to provide the citizenry with truth. Sometimes the truth can have a moral point. Sometimes the truth is painful. Sometimes the truth is banal. But it has to be true. It must have a granitelike foundation in fact. The mere stacking of facts is not, of course, enough. The facts must be organized into a coherent whole. They must tell a story. And the great story usually tells us something larger than the mere facts, something about what novelists and philosophers have called, perhaps too grandly, the human condition.”
― Pete Hamill, News Is a Verb: Journalism at the End of the Twentieth Century

“Our understanding of what is really 'newsworthy' is a misunderstanding.”
― Louis Yako

“The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and 'the public's right to know'; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer

“A corrections box such as which appears in many top US or British papers to rectify misspellings, mistaken dates, faulty identifications and so forth, is generally unheard of here... Once I pointed out to Messagero night editor that the first edition he was putting out had misspelled the name of town where the US president was holding a summit. “Oh, no one will notice,” he shrugged rather than change it.”
― Sari Gilbert, My Home Sweet Rome: Living (and loving) in Italy's Eternal City

“Sometimes, in fact - and I’ve heard others say the sane thing - I have to read a story about developments in Italy in the foreign press to get a good, quick overall view of what is going on. And this is particularly true if you’ve been away and missed the first few days of coverage; Italian news stories rarely give you any background.”
― Sari Gilbert, My Home Sweet Rome: Living (and loving) in Italy's Eternal City

“There are three kinds of writers of news in our generation. In inverse order of worldly consideration, they are:
1. The reporter, who writes what he sees.
2. The interpretive reporter, who writes what he sees and what he construes to be its meaning.
3. The expert, who writes what he construes to be the meaning of what he hasn’t seen.
... All is manifest to [the expert], since his conclusions are not limited by his powers of observation. Logistics, to borrow a word from the military species of the genus, favor him, since it is possible to not see many things at the same time. For example, a correspondent cannot cover a front and the Pentagon simultaneously. An expert can, and from an office in New York, at that.”
― A.J. Liebling, The Press

“I have more respect for a ‘call girl’ that sells her body but not her soul, than for political prostitutes that sell their soul but not their body.”
― A.E. Samaan