Hodding Carter Quotes

The lead story on MSNBC was the news that there was nothing new to report in the Gary Condit story. So remember when there is nothing new to report, MSNBC will be the station not to report it first.

A reporter is always concerned with tomorrow. There's nothing tangible of yesterday. All I can say I've done is agitate the air ten or fifteen minutes and then boom - it's gone.

Journalism never admits that nothing much is happening.

It's tabloid. It's 24/7 news - people get in the middle of a news cycle for 24 hours off of things that previously would never have gotten the kind of coverage that is happening.

a sensation is always the same as a piece of news, and a piece of news never lives long.

The maddest phenomenon in this wholly mad world – that the filming or wirelessing of an event, whether it is the Grand National or an attack in force on the Maginot Line, is held to be of more importance than the event itself.

If you just turn to your paper or television each day, there are thousands of stories that are much more shocking than the gallery artworks.

It's an incredibly limited sphere those tabloids have, isn't it? Basically, they can accuse people of being gay and they can accuse people of taking drugs, but they can't get any more sensational without entering into the realm of incredibly bad taste.

If you look at Drudge and if you see headlines that portend the end of the world tomorrow, don't click on it. Just avoid the crap that pollutes the daily so-called news that comes from left-wing news organizations. You will be amazed. And it doesn't take long, either. Just two days. You go on a Drive-By Media fast, two days of it, and your outlook on life will be dramatically improved.

Hard news really is hard. It sticks not in the craw but in the mind. It has an almost physical effect, causing fear, interest, laughter or shock.

Television has a real problem. They have no page two. Consequently every big story gets the same play and comes across to the viewer as a really big, scary one.

How many beautiful trees gave their lives that today's scandal should, without delay, reach a million readers.

The Chicago City News Bureau was a tripwire for all the newspapers in town when I was there, and there were five papers, I think. We were out all the time around the clock and every time we came across a really juicy murder or scandal or whatever, they'd send the big time reporters and photographers, otherwise they'd run our stories. So that's what I was doing, and I was going to university at the same time.

I have a problem with the strip that runs along the bottom of the news programs. Don't these idiots who run the news programs know we don't want to read? That's why we're watching TV.

The way the media cycle works, the way the news works, and the way people's attention span works, is that we only learn that people exist when there is crisis.

There is too much talk and gossip; pictures are apparently made, like stock-market prices, by competition of people eager for profits... All this traffic sharpens our intelligence and falsifies our judgment.

Criminal cases receive the attention of the press. The cruel and disagreeable things of life are more apt to get the newspaper space than the pleasant ones. It must be that most people enjoy hearing of and reading about the troubles of others. Perhaps men unconsciously feel that they rise in the general level as others go down.

For too long, reporters for the big media outlets have been fixated on novelty, always moving too quickly onto the next big score or the next hot get. Paradoxically, in these days of instant communication and sixty-minute news cycles, it's actually easier to miss information we might otherwise pay attention to. That's why we need stories to be covered and re-covered until they filter up enough to become part of the cultural bloodstream.

Newspapers are horror happening to other people.

Looking back, I still can't believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of 'experts' all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more 'shocking' and 'in-depth' than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do.

The evil that men do lives on the front pages of greedy newspapers, but the good is oft interred apathetically inside.

I don't think I would worry about an oversaturation of information if it was indeed information. It is the slovenly, hasty traffic in cliché and sensationalism and bad reasoning that bothers me. I love finding arcane primary texts on the web. The people who think to put them up are heroes of mine.

The press lives on disaster.

It is impossible to read the daily press without being diverted from reality. You are full of enthusiasm for the eternal verities - life is worth living, and then out of sinful curiosity you open a newspaper. You are disillusioned and wrecked.

The real news is bad news.