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Laws of Truth in Reporting
1. The closer you are to the facts of a situation, the more obvious are the errors in all news coverage of the situation.
2. The further you are from the facts of a situation, the more you tend to believe news coverage of the situation.

What the proprietorship of these newspapers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility - the prerogative of the harlot through the ages.-- Stanley Baldwin

I am unable to understand how a man of honor can take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust. --Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

They are so filthy and bestial that no honest man would admit one into his house for a water-closet doormat. ~ Charles Dickens (on American newspapers)

The newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, conthrols th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward
Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley), 1867-1938 in Observations by Mr. Dooley: The Newspaper.

The duty of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." --Finley Peter Dunne (1902)

Nobody's interested in sweetness and light.
Hedda Hopper (1890-1966) "The Last Word - A Treasury of Women's Quotes," by Carolyn Warner, 1992.

She (Margaret Thatcher) regarded journalism as the haunt of the brittle, the cynical and the unreliable. - Bernard Ingham, Kill the Messenger, p168

The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them: inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehood and errors. --Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

For we who live to please must please to live.-- Samuel Johnson

Everything you read in the newspaper is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge. --Erwin Knoll

In his own lifetime Jesus made no impact on history. This is something that I cannot but regard as a special dispensation on God's part, and, I like to think, yet another example of the ironical humour which informs so many of His purposes. To me, it seems highly appropriate that the most important figure in all history should thus escape the notice of memoirists, diarists, commentators, all the tribe of chroniclers who even then existed . . . Malcolm Muggeridge Jesus: The Man Who Lives, NY: Harper & Row, 1975

People in the media say they must look at the president with a microscope. Now, I don‚t mind a microscope, but boy, when they use a proctoscope, that‚s going too far.-- Richard Nixon ATTRIBUTION: NBC TV 8 Apr '84

Journalism: A profession whose business it is to explain to others what it personally does not understand. -- Lord Northcliffe

To read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them; . . . best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself.- Shimon Peres (1923-____) R:Referring to The "New York Times; in "The Enigma of Arrival," "The Journey," 1987.

What qualifies journalists to know the truth when they see it? Are they philosophers? Judges? Theologians? Do they have the leisure to reflect upon events and their meaning? Rarely.~ Arthur Plotnik, Honk If You're a Writer (1992)

Nest of vipers. The bloody reds. - Denis Thatcher describing the BBC to its new chairman, Marmaduke Hussey in Barnett and Curry, The Battle for the BBC, p39

Publish and be damned. (when being blackmailed) --Arthur Wellesley (1769-1852)

There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. Oscar Wilde