Media History Quotes

In newspaper literature woman made her entrance at an early period and in an important manner. The first daily newspaper in the world was established and edited by a woman, Elizabeth Malet, in London, March, 1702. It was called The Daily Courant.

The press deserved the attacks and criticisms of Will Irwin (1910) and Upton Sinclair (1920) and the muckrakers who followed, and it needs today the watchdog and gadfly activities of the new critical weeklies, but all in all it is now a better medium of mass information.... The 1972 Watergate disclosures, it is true, were made by only a score of the members of the mass media, but I remember Teapot Dome when only one of our 1,750 dailies (the Albuquerque Morning Journal) dared to tell the truth about White House corruption. We have come a long way since.

In the '50s and '60s, journalism wasn't a profession. It wasn't something you went to college for - it was really more of a trade. You had a lot of guys who came up working in newspapers at the copy desk, or delivery boys, and then they would somehow become reporters afterward and learn on the job.

I've always been a big consumer of American journalism over the years and had an interest in the history of it and of the press in America; how it has changed.

Anyone who thinks that negative campaigning is a modern invention has never read the nineteenth century press

A lot of the questions raised about television's power and influence on events have applied throughout history to every mass-communications medium - most particularly print, because that's the medium we've had the longest.

For decades, Barbara Walters has been described as a broadcast pioneer - and with good reason. In 1974, Walters became the first female host of the 'Today' show. In 1976, she became the first woman to serve as a network-news anchor. In 1984, she moderated the first presidential debate between Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan.

What's really going on here is, this is a media shift. It's comparable to what happened in the 1950s and the birth of electronic mass media back then.This is the birth of a new kind of personal media, where, instead of we're all watching one program, we're all watching each other. And the history of media makes it really clear. Whenever we have a big innovation, the first wave of stuff we do is pretty crummy. The printing press gave us pornography, cheap thrillers, and how-to books. Television gave us Newt Minow's vast wasteland.

None of the black abolitionist newspapers, the first of which appeared in 1827, was in existence after the Civil War.

Trolling is an ancient problem. It's been around as long as there has been media.

In America, there's a very long tradition of a comic strip that comes in newspapers, which is not true all over the world. To sell papers, they put color comics in.

Those who suppose the modern media uniquely prone to hyperbole, fantasy and deceit should consider the madness of rumor and invention that overtook the world’s press in 1914.

I got an idea: people like news why don't we write the news down on a piece of paper, and we'll gas them up and drive them to everyone's house. I mean, if you were going to say that now, it doesn't sound like a great idea, because there are other ways you can distribute the news.

Let's be clear: there was no golden age of journalism. The media has always been bad. And instead of improving, it spent a lot of time and energy making up its own myth.

I worked at ABCNews.com at a time when nobody knew what 'dot com' was.

The history of media is the market share of advertising dollars has followed.. albeit with a lag.

First. I began my career as a copy girl. and the White House coverage, for example, was in the then-Women's section. So it was social coverage. It wasn't news, although we often got rather startling news out of it.

I remember Chicago well. That's where I started in radio in 1930 and it snowed a lot that year, too.

CNN was just a glimmer in my eye when I was growing up in Atlanta.

I came up during the formative years of TV.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

That's what I think a journalist from the '70s and '80s should look like - as though he has led a full journalistic life.

The 1960s was a heroic age in the history of the art of communication - the audacious movers and shakers of those times bear no resemblance to the cast of characters in 'Mad Men.'

I think public access television has more to do with my career than anything else in the world. And that's a system that's been around of many decades and is something that people think is so outdated that they don't even think it still exists.

Theodore Roosevelt may have invented the sound byte.