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The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it.
--
More magazine (1974)

 

Alexander Cockburn

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It must be emphasized that an intensive study of national socialistic "prehistory" reveals a curious lack of original thought in Hitler's concepts; Hitler's strength consists solely in the clever use of already existing trends, ideas, and situations. It lies in the very nature of mass leaders that they cannot be "original"; the mass leader is necessarily a virtuoso of commonplaces which he may or may not repeat in the guise of a "new discovery." The modern dictator is not out to contradict but to confirm already existing views (and prejudices).

 

Adolf Hitler

 

Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.

 

Tom Stoppard

 

Kesey practices what has come to be known as gonzo journalism. The reporter, often intoxicated, fails to get the story but delivers instead a stylishly bizarre account that mocks conventional journalism.

 

Ken Kesey

 

There are a lot of ways to practice the art of journalism, and one of them is to use your art like a hammer to destroy the right people — who are almost always your enemies, for one reason or another, and who usually deserve to be crippled, because they are wrong. This is a dangerous notion, and very few professional journalists will endorse it — calling it "vengeful" and "primitive" and "perverse" regardless of how often they might do the same thing themselves. "That kind of stuff is opinion," they say, "and the reader is cheated if it's not labelled as opinion." Well, maybe so. Maybe Tom Paine cheated his readers and Mark Twain was a devious fraud with no morals at all who used journalism for his own foul ends. And maybe H. L. Mencken should have been locked up for trying to pass off his opinions on gullible readers and normal "objective journalism." Mencken understood that politics — as used in journalism — was the art of controlling his environment, and he made no apologies for it. In my case, using what politely might be called "advocacy journalism," I've used reporting as a weapon to affect political situations that bear down on my environment.

 

Hunter S. Thompson

 

His journalism was usually about journalism: no matter what he started out off writing about, he ended up writing about Hunter Thompson trying to cover a story.

 

William McKeen