Jennifer Lee Quotes

What they will do is, you know the tabloids. They'll take one element of a story that may be true and they'll build everything around it. Take a picture and invent a story around it.

It's gonna be short if it's news; put it at the top. Style's not an issue, just make it news.

I worked for a newspaper in Europe for, I lived in Europe for about seven years, so I worked in this sort of a yellow journalism kind of a thing, it was like a scandal sheet.

Headlines are so great in a sense that they can take a little bit from an article completely out of context and blow it into something it's not. Some people really only read headlines.

I've had two instances when I've met journalists face to face and we've had good interviews and I've said, 'We don't have children, by the way,' and then they've written it. I'm not sure what that's about. As misleading facts go, it's not a terrible one but it isn't true - we don't have kids.

When you're writing for newspapers you have all these parameters. You can't swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you're writing for the next day.

Headlines twice the size of the events.

Why don't you put that in the headline: 'He Only Did Three With Doris!' Set a lot of people straight.

Newspapers are so boring. How can you read a newspaper that starts with a 51-word lead sentence?

Headline writing is an art form.

Pick up any newspaper in the morning. Count the words in the lead sentences. There will be at least 25 in all of them: Guaranteed. The writers just want to tell you how many degrees they have from this college or that university.

I don't appreciate, really, talking to journalists when there's a sense of wanting to kick up dust to sell more papers or get more hits on their Internet site.

The lowest form of popular culture - lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives - has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.

What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation, and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy!

Sensationalism is entertaining, but substance is what matters.

I went to UMass-Amherst and was like, 'I want to work in news, I want to be a journalist.' Then I got there and was like, 'what kind of crap is this?' They inflate everything. It will be like snowing outside, like just a little bit, and they are like 'Giant storm coming, batten down the hatches!' and I just didn't like that aspect of it.

It is sad that some people in the media like to create stories to sell their media, without any real facts to back up their stories.

A newspaper has three things to do. One is to amuse, another is to entertain and the rest is to mislead.

Putting people in a room and strapping wires to their wrist to find out if I make them tingle when I'm telling them about Beirut is a long way from Edward R. Murrow.

I operate under the assumption that the mass media will never be accurate. ... It operates with the objective to simplify and exaggerate, which is exactly what Walt Disney told his cartoonists.

My problem is that people have been writing books about me.A lot of things that people write about you are incorrect, but you don't fight about it.

Taking pleasure in the dark side may be some sort of occupational hazard for reporters.

For most folks, no news is good news; for the press, good news is not news.

It was always hard work to push through a crowed of reporters with the scent of blood in their nostrils. You might not think so, since on camera they appear to be brain-damaged wimps with severe eating disorders. But put them at a police barricade and a miraculous thing happens...The strength comes from some mysterious place-and somehow, when there is gore on the ground, these anorexic creatures can push their way through anything. Without mussing their hair, too.

Just as some things are too strange for fiction, others are too true for journalism.