Michael Schudson Quotes

What's wrong with it is, it lowers, to say the least, the credibility of the magazine. And if I were writing for [The New Republic ], I would feel diminished because the owner had done such a thing [fire a journalist].

I think that moral philosophy is useful for framing questions, but terrible at answering them. I think moral psychology is booming right now, and we're making a lot of progress on understanding how we actually work, what our moral nature is.

Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think...of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the 'right' notes and the 'wrong' ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.

To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.

You are to do the choosing here and now during this exciting and wonderful time on earth. Moral agency, the freedom to choose, is certainly one of God's greatest gifts next to life itself. We have the honorable right to choose; therefore, we need to choose the right. This is not always easy.

I think that if you feel imaginatively towards a subject, you really shouldn't do it in a journalistic context, because then you're just fabricating, and that's crazy.

Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.

I think moral philosophy is speculation on how we ought to live together done by people who have very little clue how people work. So I think most moral philosophy is disconnected from the species that we happen to be. In fact, they like it that way. Many moral philosophers insist that morality grows out of our rationality, that it applies to any rational being anywhere in the universe, and that it is not based on contingent or coincidental facts about our evolution.

If you are writing something in which you are really involved, you don't even need to think about it any longer. The situation itself demands your total commitment as an individual, just as in your political commitments.

Is there anybody here who thinks that following the orders takes away the blame Is there anybody here who wouldn't mind a murder by another name?

In a way, I think we all want to look to that journalistic voice as a kind of global omniscience, a big eye to correct for our own limited purview: "Here's a realistic accounting of the world in which we live."

It is a prejudice to think that morality is more favourable to the development of reason than immorality.

I read these words which are the sum of all moral philosophy, and which cut short all the disputes of the casuists: When in doubt if an action is good or bad, refrain.

I mean, I think everybody in the world, all the young people in the world, went to journalism school and wanted to investigate everything. And I think they overdid it. I think that you have to investigate things, you have to e skeptical, but you shouldn't be vengeful. You have to be fair and you have to be careful.

Let's say that, personally, I loved Hillary Clinton. Would WikiLeaks still publish this material? Of course it would. Otherwise, we would be censoring it. That's our mandate. It's actually interesting to think about what media organizations wouldn't publish such material if it was given to them.

I think that - not just as a journalist but as a human being - I have the ethical responsibility to avoid actions that can harm innocent people.

I think the news people no longer have any idea of what covering the news is.

In philosophy class I think we finally decided that 'good' is an infinitely recursive term - it can't be defined except in terms of itself. Good is good because it's better than bad, though why it's better to be good than bad depends on how you define good, and on and on.

Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable. A journalist is someone 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.

D'you know how embarrassing it is to mention good and evil in a scientific laboratory? Have you any idea? One of the reasons I became a scientist was not to have to think about that kind of thing.

What I wound up doing, which I think is really journalistically dubious, is changing the order of some of the things I did, so that the things I ended up struggling with the most wind up being two-thirds of the way in.

Making stuff up is the worst thing a journalist can do. Plagiarizing is the second worst.

If it's anything that's going to result in suffering to animals or people, then I don't think [the end] justifies the means... Yeah; but then again if you could hurt ten people to save 100 people and there was no option, what would you do? I can't really address that.

"The [London] Times" has published no rumours; it's only reported facts, namely that other, less responsible papers are publishing certain rumours.

I think truth as an idea should be left to the philosophers and perhaps religious leaders and politicians, and professional people who deal with that idea.