W. Eugene Smith Quotes

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.

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.

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

Journalists aren't supposed to be cheerleaders.

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.

I want the news delivered unbiased. I thought that was the whole point with journalism.

Journalists are simply leftists disguised as reporters. They're political activists disguised as reporters.

For the journalist, anything probable is gospel truth.

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

I am always hearing from Israelis, 'Oh, CNN is anti-Israel,' or 'BBC is against us.' But no, they are reporting facts.

When I was in journalism school, you were taught to be completely objective. But we don't see that anymore.

If establishment journalists were to replicate actual stenography, it would be an improvement on most of the work they produce.

There is a long-standing tradition in the mainstream press of middle-of-the-road journalism that is objective and fair. I would hate to see that fall victim to a panic about the Fox effect.

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.

You can construct whatever story you want to. Documentaries are constructions, as is all journalism.

I believe that 'advocacy journalism' is not an oxymoron. If that means that I'm going to disrupt the cable, partisan fracas of obsession over what this means from left and right, then so be it. I will be disruptive of it.

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.

I think it's a problem when journalists have the title of their article before they do the interview, because it biases the way they conduct it.

The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it.

When a reporter sits down at the typewriter, he's nobody's friend.

As to the journalist himself, it is clear that to get a living he must write to order, that is, he must write in accordance with the views of his paper, in so far as he writes at all on current topics.

Many reporters, when they go to work in the nation’s capital, begin thinking of themselves as participants in the political process instead of glorified stenographers.

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

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.

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