Journalism over here is not only an obsession but a drawback that cannot be overrated. Politicians are frightened of the press, an...d in the same way as bull-fighting has a brutalising effect upon Spain (of which she is unconscious), headlines of murder, rape, and rubbish, excite and demoralise the American public.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The lowest form of popular culture--lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reali...ty of most people's lives--has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People accuse journalism of being too personal; but to me it has always seemed far too impersonal. It is charged with tearing away... the veils from private life; but it seems to me to be always dropping diaphanous but blinding veils between men and men. The Yellow Press is abused for exposing facts which are private; I wish the Yellow Press did anything so valuable. It is exactly the decisive individual touches that it never gives; and a proof of this is that after one has met a man a million times in the newspapers it is always a complete shock and reversal to meet him in real life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Evidently there are plenty of people in journalism who have neither got what they liked nor quite grown to like what they get. The...y write pieces they do not much enjoy writing, for papers they totally despise, and the sad process ends by ruining their style and disintegrating their personality, two developments which in a writer cannot be separate, since his personality and style must progress or deteriorate together, like a married couple in a country where death is the only permissible divorce.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Computers were originally just supposed to be number-crunchers, but now their number-crunching has been harnessed in a thousand im...aginative ways to create new virtual machines, such as video games and word processors, in which the underlying number-crunching is almost invisible, and in which new powers seem quite magical. Our brains, similarly, weren't designed (except for some very recent peripheral organs) for word processing, but now a large portion--perhaps even the lion's share--of the activity that takes place in adult human brains is involved in a sort of word processing: speech production and comprehension, and the serial rehearsal and rearrangement of linguistic items, or better, their neural surrogates. And these activities magnify and transform the underlying hardware powers in ways that seem (from the "outside") quite magical.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable. A journalist is so...meone who looks at the world and the way it works, someone who takes a close look at things every day and reports what she sees, someone who represents the world, the event, for others. She cannot do her work without judging what she sees.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »