Joe Klein Quotes

The front pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times are very important in shaping what other people think. They're like writing a memo to the White House.

I was brought up in a publishing home, a newspaper man's home, and was excited by that, I suppose. I saw that life at close range and, after the age of ten or twelve, never really considered any other.

I think newspapers will survive in some form or another.

I come from a long line of people that write. My folks ran a weekly newspaper.

The American might be defined as a newspaper-reading animal.

I write a syndicated column for The Washington Post that goes to about 200, 250 papers.

Make the paper interesting.

All the news that fits we print.

NEWS is that which comes from North, East, West and South, and if it comes from only one point of the compass, then it is a class publication and not news.

I enjoy seeing the press. I learn much from reporters. In the White House press corps alone there are at least half a dozen experts already on animal husbandry.

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

This man here [Walter Lippmann] is the greatest journalist in the world, and he's a friend of mine.

The press are the chroniclers of history as it is made.

Then there is the newspaper press, that huge engine for making the political test final.

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

Newspapers always excite curiosity.

If the press doesn’t get the proper care and feeding, you don’t get the proper spin on your story.

Great reporters get people to talk to them. Master reporters get people to want to talk to them.

Our job is to get as close to the verified truth as is possible.

It’s a lot easier and cheaper to have thumbsuckers and pundits on television than it is to have reporters and news bureaus around the world.

I get my information from the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Fox News.

I don’t care if you fuck the elephants, but if you do, you can’t cover the circus.

We journalists in America take it for granted that we are not going to be killed for our work. Unfortunately, this is not true elsewhere in the world.

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

Cynicism is what passes for insight among the mediocre [journalists]