Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

Some people will say that words like ‘scum’ and ‘rotten’ are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

You know it's always amazed me - I think the most startling thing that's happened in the last couple of decades is that there is no sort of objective reporting anymore.

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.

Many journalists seem to believe that we have become little different from our enemies.

With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

Stop pretending journalists are anything other than the Hillary PR team.

I do think people have suggested that it would be a good thing if the reporting were accurate on Al-Jazeera and if it were not slanted in ways that appear to be at times just purely inaccurate.

The first word I would remove from the folklore of journalism is the word objective.

The news is a public service. It's a way to inform people of what's going on in their world. And when you make it about ratings and make it about ad dollars, there's no incentive to inform people. The incentive is to be sensationalistic and get as many people to watch as you can without any regard for truth or objectivity.

Apparently the only time the press gets it right is when the White House illegally leaks it to them.

Look at this Judith Miller thing. Isn't that problematic? Like, she's getting fed information from the White House and she's feeding it to her editors and then it's in the Times and then the people at the White House can quote themselves? And it's the New York Times!

Media is set up to give information to the people - at least that's what it says. But we all know in the U.S. that media is a capitalistic system, people are getting paid to write things, they have bosses and editors, and they have bosses, and they put pressure on people to write intriguing stories that catch the eye.

Yes, the mainstream media is painfully biased.

I don't believe reporters are supposed to be the story. That's how I was trained.

The primacy of preaching over reporting inevitably leads journalism down a path of hyperbole, distortion and outright fabrication.

The New York Times and PBS are gatekeepers of a sort. And they perform that role of gatekeeping with a set of rules and aspirations about where they want to lead their viewers and their readers. They value objective facts, and they attempt to transmit a comprehensive view of the world. And they do have values. And they do lead their viewers and their readers to certain conclusions. But it's different than such monopolies as Apple or Google which are dissecting information into these bits and pieces, which they're then transmitting to people. And it's about clicks.

We are owned by propagandists against the Arabs. There's no question about that. Congress, the White House, and Hollywood, Wall Street, are owned by the Zionists. No question in my opinion. They put their money where their mouth is...We're being pushed into a wrong direction in every way.

No honest journalist should be willing to describe himself or herseif as 'embedded.' To say, 'I'm an embedded journalist' is to say, 'I'm a government Propagandist.

Asking the question whether the mainstream media has a liberal or conservative bias is like asking whether al Qaeda uses too much oil in their hummus. I might think they use a little bit too much oil; some people might think it's a little dry. But the problem with al Qaeda is they want to kill us. And the problem with the mainstream media is that it has these other biases that are much more important.

A big part of my book deals with the caliber of journalism. Our journalism in general is deplorable, and on elections in particular it's very ineffectual. There are a lot of problems, a lot of them having to do with to problems within the professional code of journalism, which defines its role as the regurgitation of what people in power say. Another big problem is that we allow people with money to basically buy what's talked about in campaigns through running TV ads.

Many of our nation's reporters and folks will not tell you the truth, and will not treat the wonderful people of our country with the respect that they deserve. I hope, going forward, we can be a little bit - a little bit different, and maybe get along a little bit better, if that's possible.

I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.

Letting journalism be from the perspective of the journalist. It's usually a no-no, and journalists are encouraged to be completely objective.

[The Freedom Writer] is full of disinformation ... typical of left-wing journals like yours, you print anything you can find that is derogatory to those with whom you disagree - without checking the facts.

I am not reporting things about people. I am reporting things about practices.