P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

Journalism: A profession whose business is to explain to others what it personally does not understand.

I've always been a big consumer of American journalism over the years and had an interest in the history of it and of the press in America; how it has changed.

My own view, there is a need for and a demonstrated need for more journalism now than there ever has been.

Maybe it is because of Facebook or something else, but I have been interested in journalism for a long time.

Today the greatest evil—and therefore the most immediate—is the press.

Right Wing watch falsely accused me of harassing Oliver Darcy, a reporter for CNN. However, I was practicing real journalism at a Conservative conference where it is the consensus that 'CNN' is fake news.

I think in many aspects the press does amazing things and helps a lot of people.

I'm fascinated by journalism. I put a keen eye, not a negative eye, on its role, particularly how it is changed by the times we're living in.

Publishing is a business, but journalism never was and is not essentially a business. Nor is it a profession.

It is an odd thing about newspapers that they live by exposure, yet they keep their own worlds concealed.

When I left Toronto and entered journalism in the late 1990s, I had many notions about the news business, nearly all of them wrong, as it turned out.

The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.

They take journalism really seriously because they know the force that it is and can be.

I absolutely reject that idea that the press is liberal and what it does is liberal. In my view, it's like accusing a doctor of malpractice or a lawyer of malfeasance.

Here in the United States, our profession is much maligned, people simply don't trust or like journalists anymore and that's sad.

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

There's a certain elitism that has crept into the attitudes of some in journalism, and it played out perfectly over the issue of these little American flag lapel pins.

News, by and large, has been the purest of all the television mediums, or at least we've tried to keep it that way, and there constantly is the argument about the separation between church and state.

In this day and age, much of journalism is about right or left, conservative or liberal, and 'The Observer' is just that: an observer. It is about truth.

I think people should be consumers of journalism.

I think people of my generation became journalists - you know, right after the broadcast pioneer fathers - because we wanted to report the big stories.

So this guy, Jeff Johnson, who is an accountant who cares nothing at all about a free press and cares nothing about journalism, he's a right winger who supported the war, you know, who two years ago told people he couldn't stand a word that I wrote.

If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast.

I don't like journalists and I hardly ever talk to them.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.