Holman W. Jenkins Jr. Quotes

There is a bias in the press for facts over fiction.

I reject the idea that journalists are messengers of the truth. It’s arrogant. I think journalism is a search for the little relative truths that at best keep us relatively sane.

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

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

The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.

Journalists prize independence - not teamwork.

All of journalism is a shrinking art. So much of it is hype. The O.J. Simpson story is a landmark in the decline of journalism.

To a journalist, good news is often not news at all.

Unfortunately because of the variety of outlets for people to speak their minds on the Internet and that kind of thing, it's made the media in general more opinionated and there's more of a 'gotcha mentality' than real reporting.

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.

Once we thought, journalists and readers alike, that if we put together enough 'facts' and gave them a fast stir, we would come up with something that, at least by the standards of short-order cooks, could be called the truth.

I think journalism gets measured by the quality of information it presents, not the drama or the pyrotechnics associated with us.

I don't believe that there's such a thing as objectivity in much of journalism, but I think there is a serious effort to and a regard for facts and into taking that stuff seriously is very important to the public discourse and it's very important to democracy.

Documentary film without nuanced journalistic sourcing risks being sensational, tendentious or broad-brushed.

Journalism, as practiced by some, has become something akin to professional wrestling—something to watch rather than believe.

We in the media should be breaking the news and not making the news.

Journalism is a giant catapult set in motion by pygmy hatreds.

The essence of American journalism is vulgarity divested of truth.

Do something good and you won’t make page one. Find something bad and you might make page one.

From forty years' experience of the wretched guess-work of the newspapers of what is not done in the open daylight, and of their falsehood even as to that, I rarely think them worth reading, and almost never worth notice.

How do you know the news is reliable if you didn’t gather it yourself?

I operate on the principle that the mass media will never be accurate. They never have been. When did yellow journalism begin? After all, their basic principle is, simplify and exaggerate.

All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced upon them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else..

In journalism the gold standard has become punditry rather than reporting.

The good journalist is never objective. He is always neutral.