Hunter S. Thompson - Journalism Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

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If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

Hunter S. Thompson
Sacrificing good men to journalism is like sending William Faulkner to work for Time magazine.

Hunter S. Thompson
If you consider the great journalists in history, you don't see too many objective journalists on that list. H. L. Mencken was not objective. Mike Royko, who just died. I. F. Stone was not objective. Mark Twain was not objective. I don't quite understand this worship of objectivity in journalism. Now, just flat-out lying is different from being subjective.

Hunter S. Thompson
So much for Objective Journalism. Don't bother to look for it here — not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

Hunter S. Thompson
The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.

Hunter S. Thompson
Journalism, to me, is just another drug - a free ride to scenes I'd probably miss if I stayed straight.

Hunter S. Thompson
Fiction is a bridge to the truth that journalism can't reach.

Hunter S. Thompson
I can't think in terms of journalism without thinking in terms of political ends. Unless there's been a reaction, there's been no journalism. It's cause and effect.

Hunter S. Thompson
As far as I'm concerned, it's a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity.

Hunter S. Thompson
Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Hunter S. Thompson
I don't think that my kind of journalism has ever been universally popular. It's lonely out here.

Hunter S. Thompson
Gonzo journalism... is a style of "reporting" based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism—and the best journalists have always known this.

Hunter S. Thompson
The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America (is that it) has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists.

Hunter S. Thompson