The Universal Journalist Homepage
What They Say About The Papers
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
1963
The press is like the peculiar uncle you keep in the attic-just
one of those unfortunate things.
G Gordon Liddy
1987
Sunday Papers
The Sunday papers are the same every weekthose ghastly obligatory
articles by women about how awful it to be a woman
Jeffrey Bernard
He had been kicked in the head by a mule when young and believed
everything he read in the Sunday papers.
George Ade
Tabloids
Tabloid journalism is the direct application of capitalism
to events and ideas
S J Taylor
Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average newspaper
is like trying to play Bach's St Matthew Passion on a ukelele.
The instrument is too crude for the work, for the audience and
for the performer.
Ben Bagdikian
Tabloids are fast reading for the slow thinking
Anon
Tabloids are things resembling the stained sheets of the famous
rather than the news sheets of the citizen.
Julie Burchill
To call someone the greatest tabloid of all time is tantamount
to calling him the greatest salesman of sticky sweets in the history
of dentistry.
Clive James
American newspapers
The average American newspaper, especially of the so-called
better sort, has the intelligence of a Baptist evangelist, the
courage of a rat, the fairness of a Prohibitionist boob-bumper,
the information of a high school janitor, the taste of a designer
of celluloid valentines and the honour of a police-station lawyer.
H.L. Mencken
The American reading his Sunday paper in a state of lazy collapse
is perhaps the most perfect symbol of the triumph of quantity
over quality.
Irving Babbitt
The American press makes one think of a gigantic super-modern
fish cannery, a hundred floors high, capitalised at 11 billion
dollars, and with tens of thousands of workers standing ready
at the canning machines, but relying for its raw material on an
inadequate number of handline fishermen in leaky rowboats.
AJ Liebling
Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering
haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.
Ben Hecht
Describing where he got the inspiration
for the journalists in his play The Front Page,
written with Charles MacArthur.
British newspapers and Fleet Street
The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who
can be dull in Fleet Street.
Charles Lamb
(1775-1834)
English essayist, author
Letter, 15 Feb 1802.
What does the cheap press talk about? Absolutely nothing except
dirty sex affairs, murders and accidents and all that goes for
an unclean and unhealthy life. The cheap press is a menace to
the nation.
The Bishop of Salisbury
1932
Nothing prepares you for how bad Fleet Street really is until
it craps on you from a great height.
Ken Livingstone
c1983
The great majority of nightshift workers are at their jobs
no more than 20 hours per week, at more that double the national
average wage. Furthermore, they get from six, eight and in some
cases twelve weeks' holiday, pensions, sickness and other benefits.
We are allowed neither to hire them or fire them.
Rupert Murdoch
Complaining in 1985 that it took 4,700 people
to produce 'The Sun' and 'The News of the World'.
Individual newspapers
Daily Mail
The Daily Mail is produced by office boys for office
boys.
Lord Salisbury
Prime minister at the time
of the paper's launch
1896
Daily Express
The Daily Express is a bloody awful newspaper full of lies,
scandal and imagination. It is a vicious newspaper.
Prince Philip
Daily Star
It will be all tits, bums, QPR and roll your own fags.
Derek Jameson
Editor of the 'Daily Star' describing its
likely content before the launch.
International Herald Tribune
Hark, the Herald Tribune sings,
Advertising wondrous things!
Tom Lehrer
Newsweek
Newsweek is a perpetual French Revolution. They keep eliminating
their best people.
Arnaud de Borchgrave
1984
New York Daily News
The New York Daily News is an obese, malevolent fishwife
screaming journalistic obscenities at more than two million persons
a day, exhorting them to go out and kill a commie for Christ -
or even just for fun.
James Aronson
New York Journal
Hatchet murders were the house speciality of the Journal, whose
front page was a virtual abattoir of murder most foul.
Lee Israel
On crime reporting in NY newspaper, 1979
New York Post
No New Yorker should take Rupert Murdoch's New York Post
seriously any longer. It makes Hustler magazine look like the
Harvard Law Review.
Abraham Beame
I wish I could sue the New York Post but it's awfully hard
to sue a garbage can.
Paul Newman
1983
New York Times
If a newspaper prints a sex crime, it's smut, but when 'The
New York Times' prints it, it's a sociological study.
Adolph S. Ochs
(1858-1935)
Publisher of 'The New York Times'
Readers' Digest
A lot of its readers are of an age where they forget to cancel.
Jerry Della Femina
Commenting on the wide
circulation of Reader's Digest
1987
The Sun
Murdoch's Sun has only one voice: loud frantic and insolent.
It has the class of a polyester shirt and the soul of a Colombian
hit-man.
'Washington Post'
1989
The Times
The Times thinks that news, like wine, improves by
keeping.
Lord Northcliffe
The Washington Post
Saying the Washington Post is just a newspaper is like saying
Rasputin was just a country priest.
Patrick J Buchanan
White House director of communications
On Post coverage of Watergate and arms sales to Iran, CNN TV 9
Dec 86