P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

The press is a watchdog. Not an attack dog. Not a lapdog. A watchdog. Now, a watchdog can't be right all the time. He doesn't bark only when he sees or smells something that's dangerous. A good watchdog barks at things that are suspicious.

In a way, I think of the press as my colleagues. I don't want to throw hand grenades at people who do something that's pretty similar to what I do. But at the same time, we all need to take ourselves seriously and be responsible as professionals. And there was a collective failure in the treatment of Christopher Jefferies.

Given what the media have put the country through this past decade, it must come as a surprise to most Americans that the press has a code of ethics.

I absolutely reject that idea that the press is liberal and what it does is liberal. In my view, it's like accusing a doctor of malpractice or a lawyer of malfeasance.

You can criticize any news staff in some ways, but the one thing that you couldn't call the Village Voice staff was a staff of stenographers, taking notes from public figures and just passing them on.

The most sacred cow of the press is the press itself

I don't want to paint everybody with the same broad brush. But I do think that the majority of folks now in the briefing room, that are going into journalism - they're not there for the facts and the pursuit of the truth.

I think that there are some in the media who have an overinflated view of their mission.

When you are a journalist, you have a big responsibility towards your audience and it is important to respect that responsibility.

As players we're held accountable for poor performance, I think the same should be said for journalists.

The media owes the responsibility to constantly tell the public the truth.

Journalists aren't supposed to be cheerleaders.

I'm very much in support of the free press, but the free press ought to be educational and informative. And I believe they have fallen down recently on that.

The whole sort of debate of classic objective journalism versus a new immersion journalism - that can go on forever... I made no bones about my position: I don't think you can be objective.

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 am not here to accuse the media of anything.

I'm not going to make general comments about the British press.

I do think that there are gray lines of morality in a newsroom, when it comes to some stories. The best-intentioned journalist still has a difficult mission, to try to boil down people.

The press these days should be rather careful about its role. We may have acquired some tendencies about over-involvement that we had better overcome.

We in the media should be breaking the news and not making the news.

American newspapers are so filthy and bestial that no honest man would admit one into his house for a water-closet doormat.

We don't print the truth. We don't pretend to print the truth. We print what people tell us. It's up to the public to decide what's the truth.

You hope the American people are fair. We recognize journalists have to kill somebody each week.

A journalists's job is not to be balanced. It is to be accurate.

Journalists always explain that people are mad at them because they tell the truth, which is often unpleasant or uncomfortable to hear. However, they fail in situations where there is more than one truth.