Ian Hislop Quotes

I was for many years myself a journalist and it is not appropriate to say a programme should not be broadcast.

You don't want to go around willy-nilly suing news organizations. That's probably self-defeating.

Nobody from the administration has officially rejected my column.

The government would be able to go to court with respect to newspaper articles, broadcast pieces and the like that they thought were bad or harmful or even against the government and try to block them.

All the libel lawyers will tell you there's no libel any more, that everyone's given up.

All the legal action I've taken against newspapers has had a massively positive effect on my life and achieved exactly what I wanted, which is privacy and non-harassment.

More than once at TechCrunch, we made AOL extremely uncomfortable with things that we wrote. But they never ordered us to write or not write about something because they understood that not only would we not comply, we'd write a post about the whole thing.

Liberty of the press is a privilege to publish, with impunity, falsehood on matters of public concern, in the honest belief it is truth, with good motives, for justifiable ends

It is a free press...There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press.

If one seeks to disseminate his ideas by means of periodicals or pamphlets, the post-office officials may decline to transmit anything that does not suit their taste; and the courts have decided that the United States post-office has precisely the same right to refuse to carry The Masses that it has to exclude sulfuric acid and dynamite from the mails.

We can make no such promises, but if the White House wanted to request the holding of a specific story, the request would have to come from the President to the Executive Editor or the Publisher.

It is a lamentable observation that because of the way our laws are skewed toward the plaintiff, London has become the libel capital of the world.

I think it's a lack of journalistic integrity to print things with anonymous sources.

A President of the United States cannot restrain anything from publication.

Obviously, whenever the government is getting involved with speech, it gives me a lot of pause. I have a background as a journalist, so that's something that I take very seriously.

There's no law preventing a journalist from publishing whatever they want.

Media doesn't like when other media gets their credentials pulled - that's not OK.

The media can allege corruption, but if I do the same against the media, I am gagging freedom of expression.

We have more freedom of the press than any other country in a similar position. Even way back in the frightened '50s, Communists, for example, could publish their magazine. The KKK published their own books. But face it, the mass media is controlled by money.

Large newspapers are routinely censored by legal costs. It is time this stopped. It is time a country said, enough is enough, justice must be seen, history must be preserved, and we will give shelter from the storm.

I don't want to impede free press, by the way. The last thing I would want to do is that.

True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot

Newspapers, magazines and other publications have the constitutional right to be offensive, even disgusting. As evidence of that, just watch this space regularly.

Comment is free but facts are sacred.

A free press is one that prints a dictator's speech but doesn't have to.