Molly Ivins Quotes

The secret of a successful newspaper is to take one story each day and bang the hell out of it. Give the public what it wants to have and part of what it ought to have whether it wants it or not.

A newspaper is a public trust, and we will suffer as a society without them. It is not the Internet that has killed them. It is their own greed, it is their own stupidity, and it is capitalism that has taken our daily newspapers from us.

Journalist, in my opinion, are mediators between the Information Age and our democracy.

The media has not done a great job in fulfilling their role - journalism's role in a democracy is to provide information on profoundly important subjects so we're an informed citizenry.

I have always been of the opinion that the right kind of journalism is a critical part of our democracy.

I worry about every newspaper. I worry about the financial undertaking, and I worry that somehow the loss of the sale of the paper version will affect their ability to have journalists and editors and producers. We really need those.

America is strong because its journalism is strong. That's how democracies work. They're only as good as the quality of the information that the public possesses. And that is where we come in.

People who think there is something pedestrian about journalism are just ignorant.

Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism.

When journalism is treated as just another widget in a commercial enterprise, the focus isn't on truth, verification or public good, but productivity and output.

People sort of take it for granted, but the more you see of the media world the more you appreciate a paper like the Times where its family continues to invest in editorial quality and I think it's the truly is the best paper in the world.

I don't have any well-developed philosophy about journalism. Ultimately it is important in a society like this, so people can know about everything that goes wrong.

I think people should be consumers of journalism.

One of the most important roles of our journalists is to be watchdogs.

The central dilemma in journalism is that you don't know what you don't know.

I don't believe that there's such a thing as objectivity in much of journalism, but I think there is a serious effort to and a regard for facts and into taking that stuff seriously is very important to the public discourse and it's very important to democracy.

I don't personally feel that I have to save democracy and journalism.

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.

The essence of American journalism is vulgarity divested of truth.

All the news that fits we print.

Journalists follow authority as sharks follow a liner, dining on the scraps that are thrown overboard.

Journalism is what we need to make democracy work.

The job of media is the accountability of government.

I always like to have a buffer between me and journalism in general. Not just a reporter, but journalism.

People say, 'Oh, you're doing the job of journalists.' I think it's very important to note that we can't do our job without journalists. Journalists can do their job without late-night comedians. They'd be just fine without us. But we, of course, use their work every day to build our pieces.