Gilbert Parker Quotes

Reporters aren't actually people!

I think the press are good people; I think they're educated people.

I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called 'The Truth'.

The dirty little secret of journalism is that it really isn't a profession, it's a craft. All you need is a telephone and a conscience and you're all set.

Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

The essence of American journalism is vulgarity divested of truth.

The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw in character.

The function of the New York Times is to enter the battlefield after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.

Don't believe anything they write about you, good or bad.

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.

My job is to cover the news and do it accurately and fair. And we do.

To newspapers and publishing houses I urge the use of fact over fiction, freedom of the press, and responsibility at all times.

Ratings don't last. Good journalism does.

Good journalism, I think, represents life and if you try to organize something too neatly it usually blows up in your face and doesn't really happen the way you want it to.

The reporter is the daily prisoner of clocked facts. On all working days, he is expected to do his best in one swift swipe at each story.

When you speak of the press, of course, you have to speak of different segments of the press. Reporters, straight reporters, wire services, you stick to the facts; you don't create the story, per se. You cover what is happening.

People who think there is something pedestrian about journalism are just ignorant.

Journalism is always the art of the incomplete. You get bits and pieces.

My comments are reserved for reputable journalists.

In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.

It's hard to know now who, if anyone, in the media has any credibility.

I'm not gonna name names, but sometimes when reporters are talking, it gets a little boring because I don't have any jokes to tell because the questions are so serious.

It's like I say to young people who ask me about going into journalism: If you want to be loved, don't go into this business.

God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.