A selection of comments about (and in some cases by) journalists:
"[Journalism] is full of lying, cheating, drunken, cocaine-sniffing,
unethical people. I love it." -- Piers Morgan, Editor, Daily Mirror
"[Journalists are] a lower quality of human being, who'll do anything for a story. (...) At press awards they jeer, boo, fight, get pissed, and that's just the cream." -- Max Clifford, in an interview for the Radio Times
"I have spent half my life trying to get away from journalism, but I am still mired in it--a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world full of misfits and drunkards and failures." -- Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
"Facing the press is more difficult than bathing a leper." -- Mother
Teresa
"Somewhere along the line, many Americans relegated the media to a notch on the morality scale only slightly above that of child molesters." -- Gregory Kane, Baltimore Sun, 1997
"A journalist is a reporter out of a job." -- Mark Twain
"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers." -- T. S. Eliot
"In terms of ravenous egos, sensitive ambition and backstabbing, the atmosphere was actually diluted compared with the behaviour of most foreign correspondents." -- Anthony Loyd, The Times
"To a newspaperman, a human being is an item with skin wrapped around it." -- Fred Allen
"No wonder the newspaper is rotten. We need more drunkards." -- Edward G. Robinson in "Five Star Final"
"If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist." -- Norman Mailer
and my personal favourite:
"Everywhere I go, I'm asked if the universities stifle writers. My
opinion is that they don't stifle half enough of them." -- Flannery O'Connor