“News is history in its first and best form, its vivid and fascinating form . . . History is the pale and tranquil reflection of it.”
“Let me just say that I’m always suspicious when I see articles about the motivations of journalists. I think they often reflect a misunderstanding of what journalism is all about. Journalists are supposed to be assholes. The system does not work, in fact, if society’s journalists are all nice, kind, friendly, rational people.
“In what Carl Bernstein has called the ‘triumph of the idiot culture,’ the ideals of truth, justice, and emancipation have become almost meaningless, mere verbiage that professional journalism organizations quaintly place in their codes of ethics. ‘For the first time in our history, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our ideal,’ says Bernstein. ... Of course, one reason newspapers have turned to gross simplicity and the sensational is to attract younger people who don’t read, and so print journalism has tried to be more like TV, becoming more simple to attract readers who still won’t read the paper.”
“In these times when big-city papers and magazines are disappearing and shrinking—The New York Times is cutting 100 more newsroom jobs and Condé Nast is closing four magazines—we need life rafts. Publications once buoyed by splashy ads evoking drinking and sex are now conjuring ways to use drinking and sex to subsidize the news. The New York Times, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal have wine clubs. Condé Nast has started an online dating Web site for a fee of $30 a month called TrulyMadlyDating.com . . . . Self-described print press ‘fanatic’ Mortimer Zuckerman, who owns The Daily News and U.S. News & World Report, proposed that the federal government could save newspapers by allowing sports betting on newspaper Web sites. . . . ‘Newspapers are so critical for public dialogue and holding public officials responsible,’ he told me. ‘And who’s going to be able to afford original reporting in the next five years? Very, very few.’”
“I think we should all care about the future health and quality of this particular business. It is, like it or not, the disposable addition to our education that either lands on the doorstep, or pops up on the computer screen, every day. But journalism is more than just a business and more than just a continuing education course. It is something that both reflects the spirit of the times, the zeitgeist, and can shape it. Good journalism can make public discourse more honest and less oversimplified, more dominated by logical thinking and less dominated by rhetoric.”
Obama v. Fox 
Counterpoint: “Surprisingly, the White House continues to declare war on a news organization instead of focusing on the critical issues that Americans are concerned about like jobs, health care and two wars.”
“I don’t like it. I think the cables have a lot to do with it. I’ll take you back to when I was president—we got tons of criticism, but didn’t seem day-in and day-out quite as personal as some of these talk show people. And it’s not just the right. There are plenty of people on the left. If you want me to name a couple of names, I’ll be glad to do that for you: Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow—I mean here are a couple of sick puppies. And the way they treat my son and treat anybody that’s opposed to their point of view is just horrible.”
“Compared to the food-fight TV, we seem like an oasis in a screaming desert.”
“The skills of finding out what is not known and rendering it in comprehensible ways has practical value in other parts of the economy, but the thrill of this thing of ours is not a moveable feast. The difference between a reporting job and other jobs is the difference between working for The Man and being The Man, a legend, at least, in your own mind.”
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“It’s such a phony war, print versus the Internet. So much of print has one foot in on the Web these days—New Yorker writers blog, Times reporters shoot digital video. And the so-called old lions are turning out wonderful journalism—see our Cheat Sheet, which is agnostic about print or online journalism, on a daily, hourly basis.”
“The rhetoric of American journalism describes an adversarial fourth estate, a redoubt for professional skeptics who scrutinize authority in the name of the public and help keep public discourse honest. As long as our newspapers enjoyed quasi-monopolies and the evening newscasts were a national touchstone, the moth-eaten reality of this self-image was easily ignored. But the hard truth is that the press mostly amplifies the agendas of others—the prominent and the powerful—and tends to aggressively assume its adversarial role only when someone or something . . . is wounded and vulnerable.”
