Jim Lehrer Quotes

The essence of American journalism is vulgarity divested of truth.

There is a bias in the press for facts over fiction.

God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.

The news and truth are not the same thing.

More and more, journalism seems to have hopped out of Truth's pocket and crept into another.

I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are.

All of journalism is a shrinking art. So much of it is hype. The O.J. Simpson story is a landmark in the decline of journalism.

I never, ever have seen media this way. It's almost indescribable. Making up stories, refusing to run real stories. It's making themselves look like utter fools. There's no journalism, there is no media. There's pure, full-fledged advocacy here.

I have yet to meet very many people in the press who are really, truly interested in writing a good story or getting at the truth. Most press people, when they come into an article, have an angle that they want already, so they need points to support that angle, whatever the angle may be.

The more servile a reporter is toward his sources, the more authoritative he can appear in print.

What you say about the newspapers is very true ... They are indeed a curious compound of truth and untruth. I am so used to newspaper nonsense and attacks that I do not mind it in the least....

I operate on the principle that the mass media will never be accurate. They never have been. When did yellow journalism begin? After all, their basic principle is, simplify and exaggerate.

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

The media is always looking for a story of one kind or another.

We're not into all those dodgy journos who makes stories up.

We take what's shown on television as the truth, and it isn't. News isn't even the truth on television. If you look up the definition of what news is, it isn't that what we're watching on the new - it's entertainment.

Well, I mean, the real attack on truth is tabloid journalism in the United States.

Giving the same value to fiction as to fact in the interest of so-called fairness is to mislead the American people and the press has become party to that.

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.

I send you the newspapers; but they do not always speak true.

Journalism is a giant catapult set in motion by pygmy hatreds.

The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw in character.

How do you know the news is reliable if you didn’t gather it yourself?

Editorialists who tell downright lies in order to advance their own agendas do more to discredit the press than all the censors in the world.