Greatest quips ever about newspapers

By the editors of Media Life

Through history there are many grand statements, often from publishers, about the noble role newspapers play in society. They are mostly of hot air and make for dull reading. Far more interesting-and entertaining-are the attacks against newspapers and their publishers for the often ignoble deeds of newspapers. As much as anything, they speak to the central role newspapers play in society, a role not enjoyed by any other medium. These remarks in many cases are delightful for the sheer wit of their vitriol. Below we’ve culled some of the best and funniest.

This is one in a number of stories on newspapers in Media Life’s ongoing series “Reinventing the American newspaper” examining all the changes taking place in the medium. 

 

 

H.L. Mencken
Known as the Sage of Baltimore, he was a longtime writer for the Baltimore Sun and a widely respected literary figure in the first half of the 20th century.

“The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a high school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer.”

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

“A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”

 

A.J. Liebling
A journalist in the first half of the last century, Liebling is best remembered for his long-running “Wayward Press” column in The New Yorker that analyzed and often savaged newspapers and their publishers for a wide range of misdeeds and violations of the public trust. 

“A city with one newspaper, or with a morning and an evening paper under one ownership, is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.”

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

“People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.”

“The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role in society is to make money.”

“There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.”

“I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy.”

 

Mark Twain
Twain is best known for his novels such as “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” but he learned the writing craft working for a slew of newspapers as a young man, and he remained a newspaperman at heart.

“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.”

“I am not the editor of a newspaper and shall always try to do right and be good so that God will not make me one.”

“It seems to me that just in the ratio that our newspapers increase, our morals decay. The more newspapers, the worse morals. Where we have one newspaper that does good, I think we have fifty that do harm. We ought to look upon the establishment of a newspaper of the average pattern in a virtuous village as a calamity.”

“Necessarily we are all fond of murders, scandals, swindles, robberies, explosions, collisions, and all such things, when we know the people, and when they are neighbors and friends, but when they are strangers we do not get any great pleasure out of them, as a rule. Now the trouble with an American paper is that it has no discrimination; it rakes the whole earth for blood and garbage, and the result is that you are daily overfed and suffer a surfeit.”

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“I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.”-A. C. Benson

“America is a country of inventors, and the greatest of inventors are the newspaper men.”-Alexander Graham Bell

“Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.”-George Orwell

“The advertisements in a newspaper are more full knowledge in respect to what is going on in a state or community than the editorial columns are.”-Henry Ward Beecher

“News is what someone doesn’t want you to know. Everything else in the newspaper is advertising.”-Anonymous

“The proper role of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”-Anonymous

“I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.”-Charles Baudelaire

“The evening papers print what they do and get away with it because by afternoon the human mind is ruined anyhow.”-Christopher Morley

“A newspaper is lumber made malleable. It is ink made into words and pictures. It is conceived, born, grows up and dies of old age in a day.”-Jim Bishop

“A newspaper is the lowest thing there is.”-Richard J. Daley

“You can love a newspaper, kid, but it will never love you back.”-Anonymous

“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.” Thomas Jefferson

“I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.”-Thomas Jefferson

“Many a good newspaper story has been ruined by over-verification.”-James Gordon Bennett

“A good newspaper is never nearly good enough but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever.”-Garrison Keillor

“Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.” —George Bernard Shaw

“The secret of a successful newspaper is to take one story each day and bang the hell out of it. Give the public what it wants to have and part of what it ought to have whether it wants it or not.”-Herbert Bayard Swope

“Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.”-Elbert Hubbard

“Probably no country was ever ruled by so mean a class of tyrants as, with a few noble exceptions, are the editors of the periodical press in this country. And as they live and rule only by their servility, and appealing to the worst, and not the better nature of man, the people who read them are in the condition of the dog that returns to his vomit.”-Henry David Thoreau

“The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.”-William Faulkner

“A newspaper, as I’m sure you know, is a collection of supposedly true stories written down by writers who either saw them happen or talked to people who did. These writers are called journalists, and like telephone operators, butchers, ballerinas, and people who clean up after horses, journalists can sometimes make mistakes.”-Lemony Snicket

“One reason that cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.”-Gwendolyn Brooks

“Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”-Napoléon Bonaparte

“Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.”-Ernest Hemingway

“Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as ‘fact’ are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.”-E. L. Doctorow

“The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw of character.”-Lyndon B. Johnson

“One-newspaper towns are not good because all the surviving newspaper does is print money. They make 25 percent on their money every year, and if they go down to 22 percent, they start laying people off.”-Pat Oliphant

“The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.”-Don Marquis

“You should always believe all you read in the newspapers, as this makes them more interesting.”-Rose Maccaulay

“Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for that rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge.”-Erwin Knoll

“Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.”-Anna Quindlen

“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.”-Oscar Wilde

“What is the difference between literature and journalism?…Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all.”-Oscar Wilde

“Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for president. One hopes it is the same half.”-Gore Vidal

“It was while making newspaper deliveries, trying to miss the bushes and hit the porch, that I first learned the importance of accuracy in journalism.”-Charles Osgood

“Saying The Washington Post is just a newspaper is like saying Rasputin was just a country priest.”-Pat Buchanan

“In my opinion, any man who can afford to buy a newspaper should not be allowed to own one.”-Roy Hattersley

“Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.”-Norman Mailer

“I read about eight newspapers in a day. When I’m in a town with only one newspaper, I read it eight times.”-Will Rogers

“Newspaper people, once celebrated as founts of ribald humor and uncouth fun, have of late lost all their gaiety, and small wonder.”-Russell Baker

“If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast.”-William Tecumseh Sherman

 

 

 

Tags: h.l. mencken, media life series, newspaper series, newspapers, reinventing the american newspaper