A Quote by Salman Rushdie
The most obvious inspiration to be brave is that we all feel it: you can't have free expression right now in a very wide range of countries. It takes a lot of guts for writers and journalists in those countries to stand up against repression and do what they do. Russia is a case in point where, as you know, journalists have an embarrassing habit of being killed for their reporting.
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Mainstream media journalists, especially in the United States and West Europe, prefer to ignore those problems in their own countries which they usually criticize in other countries, including in Russia.
What outrages me as a representative of journalists is that there's not more outrage about the number, and the brutality, and the cavalier nature of the U.S. military toward the killing of journalists in Iraq....They target and kill journalists ... uh, from other countries, particularly Arab countries like Al -, like Arab news services like Al-Jazeera, for example. They actually target them and blow up their studios with impunity.
When I joined Bloomberg, I was especially eager to take advantage of the organization's size. Because I work on a wide variety of stories, bouncing between industries and countries, it's immensely useful to work together with so many journalists with such a wide range of expertise.
The recent history of Ukraine is replete with dead journalists, beaten journalists, news agencies being shut down, and politicians being injured or killed. Most are killed in mysterious auto accidents.
Journalists in newspapers and in many magazines are not permitted to be subjective and tell their readers what they think. Journalists have got to follow a very strict formulaic line, and here we come, these non-fiction writers, these former journalists who are using all the techniques that journalists are pretty much not allowed to use.
The first victim in journalism today is proximity. I know I've used that word a lot. Because of foreign budgets, newspapers have consolidated, and journalists now cover dozens of countries at a time. It is physically not possible for one person to understand and live the unique sets of experiences in all these places in honest and meaningful ways. Outlets used to send journalists to places like Congo for months at a time, and they were stationed there for months or years. There was a sense of immersive reporting, and that has been a casualty of the shift in news over the past years.
I am suspicious of writers who go looking for issues to address. Writers are neither preachers nor journalists. Journalists know much more than most writers about what's going on in the world. And if you want to change things, you do journalism.
Journalists are more powerful now than they've ever been, and we all know what power does. Anyone who disses the media is really asking for it. But it is the case that the journalists are what they are - world famous for vulgarity, alcoholism, spite.
What really resonated with my students, I think, is that most of the writers we worked with were journalists, and when they saw journalists simply raising questions and being put in jail for that, it did freak them out a little bit.
I think that all journalists, specifically print journalists, have a responsibility to educate the public. When you handle a culture's intellectual property, like journalists do, you have a responsibility not to tear it down, but to raise it up. The depiction of rap and of hip-hop culture in the media is one that needs more of a responsible approach from journalists. We need more 30-year-old journalists. We need more journalists who have children, who have families and wives or husbands, those kinds of journalists. And then you'll get a different depiction of hip-hop and rap music.
A lot of journalists are talented enough to write a mystery novel, and I would say that most of the top-end mystery writers actually started out as reporters. But there is more to it than just the writing; there's a learning process, and most journalists aren't willing to do it.
A newspaper, as I'm sure you know, is a collection of supposedly true stories written down by writers who either saw them happen or talked to people who did. These writers are called journalists, and like telephone operators, butchers, ballerinas, and people who clean up after horses, journalists can sometimes make mistakes.
I want my words to survive translation. I know when I write a book now I will have to go and spend three days being intensely interrogated by journalists in Denmark or wherever. That fact, I believe, informs the way I write - with those Danish journalists leaning over my shoulder.
We journalists make it a point to know very little about an extremely wide variety of topics; this is how we stay objective.
The truth is, I don't have any problem with journalists - I count some of them as friends - also some of my heroes are journalists, I'm a big fan of Robert Fisk - great people or crazy people who are prepared to stand up for what's right.
Americans have called on moderates in Muslim countries to speak out against extremists, to stand up for the tolerance they say they believe in. We should all have the guts do the same at home.
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