New Statesman Quotes

The Press is such as the public demands, and the public demands bad newspapers because it has been badly educated.

The newspapers, magazines and other journals of the country, it is safe to say, have shed and continue to shed, more light on the public and business affairs of, the nation than any other instrumentality of public; and since informed public opinion is the most potent of all restraints upon misgovernment, the suppression or abridgment of the publicity afforded by a free press cannot be regarded otherwise than with grave concern.

Newspapers at that time did not necessarily try to flatter those in power. Rather, they wrote to please readers. I may sound evasive. but there certainly existed some kind of mechanism that aggravated the situation through subtle interactions between newspapers and the public. Readers were waiting for articles reporting the exploits of the victorious Imperial Forces, Newspapers indulged themselves in a competition to appear more patriotic and to see who could print the most articles urging and exalting victory. Newspaper companies cooperated through the dispatch of entertainers, calls for patriotic songs, campaigns for contributions to build more airplanes, and various other ways. The heavy responsibility that the newspapers bear is second only to that of the government.

That endless book, the newspaper, is our national glory.

Newspapers are the schoolmasters of the common people.

The front pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times are very important in shaping what other people think. They're like writing a memo to the White House.

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.

Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, conthrols th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward.

How united would the United States be without its newspapers?

The highest reach of a news-writer is an empty reasoning on policy, and vain conjectures on the public management.

The American might be defined as a newspaper-reading animal.

Our government has become too responsive to trivial or ephemeral concerns, often at the expense of more important concerns or an erosion of our liberty, and it has made policy priorities more dependent on where TV journalists happen to point their cameras....

The newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct

I think sometimes the recording of each act which has gone into the perpetration of some crime simply gives new suggestions to less fertile minds. I realize that crimes are "news," but I wonder if they could not be very briefly recorded, leaving out as much detail as possible and by doing so it might be easier for the arm of the law to proceed in unsolved crimes. The public is, of course, to blame, for apparently there is a curious fascination for many people in the reading of all these gruesome details. Is there no way that the public for its own protection can be induced to forego some of this particular type of reading matter?

There are those who blame the Press, but in this I think they are mistaken. The Press is such as the public demands, and the public demands bad newspapers because it has been badly educated.

The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.

I read the papers like everybody else, so I don't complain about what they print.

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.

The [London] Times has made many ministries.

The press ... is but the servant of human intellect and its ministry is for good or evil, according to the character of those who direct it. The press is a mill that grinds all that is put into its hopper. Fill the hopper with poisoned grain and it will grind it to meal, but there is death in the bread.

Burke said there were three estates in Parliament; but in the reporter's gallery yonder, there sat a fourth estate more important far than they all.

It’s always a danger when an institution like the press becomes disconnected from the people.

A laboring man now hardly goes to work until he has read the news.

[Commenting on Shays' Rebellion:] The way to prevent these regular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro' the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people.

Newspapers form public opinion, but public opinion also influences newspapers. The general masses are not like horses that can be tamed and trained to do their masters bidding.