Jonathan Yardley Quotes

The media's gotten lazy. They don't check anything out. You report what he reports.

Journalism: A profession whose business is to explain to others what it personally does not understand.

A common criticism of establishment journalists entails comparing them to stenographers, on the ground that most of them do little more than mindlessly write down and uncritically repeat what government officials say.

I believe that 'advocacy journalism' is not an oxymoron. If that means that I'm going to disrupt the cable, partisan fracas of obsession over what this means from left and right, then so be it. I will be disruptive of it.

Journalists are accused of being lapdogs when they don't ask the hard questions, but then accused of being rude when they do. Good thing we have tough hides.

I do not subscribe to the advocacy journalism school. It's not who I am and not who CNN wants me to be.

We journalists are never so idiotic as when we analyze things that we shouldn't be analyzing.

There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

We're going to fisk the 'New York Times.'

The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the grieves and shames of others.

I think the media has become incredibly corrupt. We used to have a profound tradition of investigative journalism in the United States. Some journalists were real heroes, such as Bob Woodward who helped uncover the Watergate scandal. But today he is leading the opposite charge, trying to bring down the careers of people and score easy victories. In other words, those who used to bust the status quo have now become the status quo.

American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.

When real substantive change happens it's the people who watch your show, they're the ones that make it happen. It's people whose names are not highlighted in history books. They're the ones that stand up in their place and time to make change.

Increasingly, people perceive no difference between the narcissistic self-serving reporters asking questions, and the narcissistic self-serving politicians who evade them.

Sometimes I look around cable news and it's like you wonder whether you're looking at anchors or authors.

You have to draw lines between being a journalist and an activist.

There's a real self-serving element to hip-hop that threatens its life span.

In the founding days of the Constitution, the purpose of the media was to make sure that powerful government officials were held accountable. It really was. I mean, it was founders who hated the media like everybody else hates the media, but they understood the role they played. This media long ago when it comes to Hillary Clinton/Bill Clinton and the Democrat Party? No, no, no, no. They're the Democrat Party now. There is no media.

The media is the only business in the world where the customer is always wrong. If you're a news consumer, if you're a customer, and you complain to them, they will tell you that you are not sophisticated enough to understand what they do, and they're tell you to go listen or watch somewhere else. They're not even really doing the news for you. They're doing news for other journalists and other people in government because that's their real audience.

No real journalist makes $5 million a year... Those in power fear and dislike real journalists.

Ordinary people can bring about change.

Real crime-beat investigative journalism does seem to be really dwindling, especially in this age with everything being centered around iPhones. Everyone's a journalist today, essentially. Every pedestrian on the street has the potential of capturing a big story on their mobile device and then selling it and making a lot of money.

Reality is an aspect of property. It must be seized. And investigative journalism is the noble art of seizing reality back from the powerful.

The most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the "best" sources.

I'm a member of the working press; you'd think I'd know better than to listen to journalists.