David Ogilvy Quotes

You know it's easy here to buy journalists.

I don't believe in gutter politics. I don't believe in gutter journalism.

Studies indicate that these children are more susceptible to advertising and even less likely to understand the purpose of this advertising.

When I was collecting material for a political gossip column, and someone said something interesting, I would wait for them to add, 'and I don't want to read that in your magazine!' In which case I wouldn't use it. But if they didn't remember to say it, I'd nip off to the loo, write the story up, come back and change the subject.

I think it's a shame that we have 'Bild' like you have the 'Sun'. Now serious newspapers like 'FAZ' and 'Spiegel' use a bit of the tone of 'Bild.' This is terrible.

In the last 15 or 20 years, I've watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to which the tabloids won't sink. I don't know who these people are but they're little pigs.

And I really believe good journalism is good business.

If there are signs that Americans bow to the gods of advertising, there are equally indications that people find the gods ridiculous. It is part of the popular culture that advertisements are silly.

I was not the only journalist to whom Trump offered gifts clearly meant to shape coverage. Many reporters have told me that Trump worked hard to offer them something fabulous - from hotel rooms to rides on his 757.

We need ethical journalism. There is also capacity limitations in journalism.

Anyone who's in the magazine business thinks about advertisers when they write about something. And anyone who says they don't is a liar.

The biggest danger to media, and what ultimately drove it apart from the public's trust, are the people who believe that they are uncorrupted when their body of work doesn't support such a belief.

I encourage members of the media to attempt to Be Best in their own professions.

The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.

The ethic of the journalist is to recognize one's prejudices, biases, and avoid getting them into print.

When the media gets into creating their own product and then deciding to cover it, they are becoming part of the process and, therefore, could be damaged.

When the dominant media invites the torturers on their programs to defend the nature of torture and then label that as "just another position," these media apparatuses have really sunken into hell. They've become something really vile and despicable. And yet they do it with a smile.

The press is, almost without exception, corrupt.

A big part of my book deals with the caliber of journalism. Our journalism in general is deplorable, and on elections in particular it's very ineffectual. There are a lot of problems, a lot of them having to do with to problems within the professional code of journalism, which defines its role as the regurgitation of what people in power say. Another big problem is that we allow people with money to basically buy what's talked about in campaigns through running TV ads.

A free press doesn't mean it's not a tame press.

I treasure the fact there's media freedom, but with that goes responsibility. I think that there should be a self-regulatory organization and that they should start to think about standards. Because I think a lot of people say, "I don't know how to read what is true versus somebody else's interpretation."

The hired journalist, I thought, ought to realize that he is partly in the entertainment business and partly in the advertising business - advertising either goods, or a cause, or a government. He just has to make up his mind whom he wants to entertain, and what he wants to advertise.

Your cameras can't control the minds of those who know, that you'll even sell your soul just to get a story sold.

Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. Yet I do not suppose there is one paper in England that can be straightforwardly bribed with hard cash. In the France of the Third Republic all but a very few of the newspapers could notoriously be bought over the counter like so many pounds of cheese.