Alan Barth Quotes

News is the first rough draft of history.

Journalism is in fact history on the run.

Newspapers are the second hand of history.

News is history shot on the wing.

We often do not get the first draft of history right.

History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

If journalism is the first draft of history, then the Internet simply has provided a new means for delivering that draft far and wide very quickly.

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

It's all storytelling, you know. That's what journalism is all about.

The whole idea of television news or any kind of news is to inform people about things they need to know about.

The people who make history are not the people who make it who are there but the people who make it and then write about it.

In America journalism is apt to be regarded as an extension of history: in Britain, as an extension of conversation.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

The press are the chroniclers of history as it is made.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product.

In the end, we journalists try - or should try - to be the first impartial witnesses of history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: 'we didn't know - no one told us.'

Writing history is writing the soul of the past...

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all

Whoever writes on world history, but not as a forensic history, becomes thereby an accomplice.

Confronted by an unknowable, historians demand evidence, witnesses, corroboration.

A lot of the stuff I blog is either stuff I'm reporting anyway for ABC News internally and figure I might as well put it up on the blog. Or it's stuff I'm just interested in, or I read about it, or I hear about it, and I'm just curious.

I am interested in the press and what they do.