A Quote by Chet Huntley

Journalists were never intended to be the cheerleaders of a society, the conductors of applause, the sycophants. Tragically, that is their assigned role in authoritarian societies, but not here - not yet.

Chet Huntley

Quote Topics

Applause Assigned Authoritarian Conductors Intended Journalists Never Role Societies Society Sycophants Were

Quote Author

Chet Huntley
American - Journalist
December 10, 1911 - March 20, 1974

In emerging democracies like Russia, in authoritarian states like Iran or even Yugoslavia, journalists play a vital role in civil society. In fact, they form the very basis of those new democracies and civil societies.

Christiane Amanpour

...self-important western journalists who'd given up their sacred trust to become cheerleaders for trendy causes, the way communist journalists had once been cheerleaders for the government...They were depriving the free world of its most valuable weapon in condemning and exposing the worst human scourge since Nazism: the targeting and murder of civilians to achieve political and religious ends.

Naomi Ragen

Good conductors know when to push and when to lay back. I've known so many great conductors that I'm still doing what I can to learn the craft of this role.

Joshua Bell

The journalists are so devoted to Obama. They are such sycophants that they're worried about access.

Rush Limbaugh

You can tell by the applause: There's perfunctory applause, there's light applause, and then there's real applause. When it's right, applause sounds like vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce.

Skitch Henderson

Journalists aren't supposed to be cheerleaders.

Eric Schlosser

I always thought that sororities were just made up of cheerleaders from high school. And I kind of picked on those cheerleaders!

Spencer Grammer

When an authoritarian regime starts taking down feeds and blocking websites just because we expose the truth... that's an attack on freedom of the press everywhere. When authoritarian regimes around the world start attacking journalists like that, we all have a problem.

Jeff Zucker

I was starting a group of musicians and we had a group of young composers in Finland back in the '70s, and the real conductors, the professional conductors at the time were not interested in our stuff.

Esa-Pekka Salonen

A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society.

Edward Abbey

... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.

Elizabeth Bowen

I don't want to hear another negative word about cheerleaders. If it weren't for cheerleaders, who would tell us when and how to be happy during athletic events? If it weren't for cheerleaders, how would America's prettiest girls get the exercise that's so vital to a healthy life?

John Green

In Austria, a rather authoritarian Catholic country, the role of the social admonisher traditionally fell to artists because there were no great political thinkers.

Elfriede Jelinek

In a cross-cultural study of 173 societies (by Herbert Barry and L. M. Paxson of the University of Pittsburgh) 76 societies typically had mother and infant sharing a bed; in 42 societies they shared a room but not a bed; and in the remaining 55 societies they shared a room with a bed unspecified. There were no societies in which infants routinely slept in a separate room.

Melvin Konner

The authoritarian one believed that an individual's rights were basically provided by governments and were determined by states. The other society - ours - tended to believe that a large portion of our rights were inherent and couldn't be abrogated by governments, even if this seemed necessary.