Yquotes.com

 

A composite is a euphemism for a lie. It's disorderly. It's dishonest and it's not journalism.
--
Commenting on New Yorker staff writer Alastair Reid's use of composite characters.
--
p.65, The interplay of influence: mass media and their publics in news, advertising, politics, Wadsworth series in mass communication, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Edition 2, Wadsworth, 1988.

 

Fred W. Friendly

» Fred W. Friendly - all quotes »

Similar quotes

 

I call it "cut and paste journalism." It's very convenient, very easy, very useful. And very dishonest.

 

Leon Bertoletti

 

Plot involves fragmentary reality, and it might involve composite reality. Fragmentary reality is the view of the individual. Composite reality is the community or state view. Fragmentary reality is always set against composite reality. Virginia Woolf did this by creating fragmentary monologues and for a while this was all the rage in literature. She was a genius. In the hands of the merely talented it came off like gibberish.

 

Rita Mae Brown

 

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