Harold Evans Quotations

Attempting to get at truth means rejecting stereotypes and cliches.

Actions are always more complex and nuanced than they seem. We have to be willing to wrestle with paradox in pursuing understanding.

In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.

For 50 years my father worked for the railroad.

The camera cannot lie, but it can be an accessory to untruth.

When I first came to the United States in 1956 I fell in love with things - mainly the vitality and the freedoms.

Throughout America's young history there has been a necessary tension between the individual and the group.

The purpose of the book is to see what happened to America; both to the people in it, and to its relationships with the rest of the world.

Jon takes a lot of pride in providing the best water possible and this has really been bothering him.

We're all told that people are busy, and have short attention spans, and yet these stories are so marvelous, and really ought to be read.

Once we get further into the irrigation season and start using more water, we'll get all of it flushed out.

It's a story of terrific heroism (with) many, many dramatic stories of individuals,

[We need to] protect copyright at all costs. Don't do cheap deals with Google and these other cyber-monsters. Recognize that the creative artist has to be maintained.

When I was studying at Chicago and at Stanford University, where many many cases of two people observing the same event have a different take on what happened.

This impressed me when I was the editor of the Sunday Times [of London] - we had the "Bloody Sunday" killings of 13 unarmed civilians by British paratroopers. We interviewed 500 people for our report, and not one of them could give us a total picture of what was happening. It was like the Rashomon effect multiplied a million times. For a website or even a newspaper to be a collector of information flow is not the highest form of journalism.

Journalism is not easy. It's the first rough draft. I don't think you need to wait around until you have the definitive thing. You record what's there; don't delude yourself that this is the ultimate historical view.

I think there's a lot of benefit in letting people vent. When I was on the Manchester Evening News, we got 500 letters a day, and part of my job as editor was to edit them. And I thought that was one of the best things in the newspaper, and it was instituted by an editor known as Big Tom, who said 'this is the voice of the people.' And he was quite right.

What I'm driving at is let's not lose sight in our excitement of the democratization of the media that some things are bad, false and ugly - and no amount of electronic gloss will make them true, beautiful and accurate.

The 'gatekeepers' became a term of revile. But when you think about the flow of information, I personally value immensely the calibration a news organ, whether it's on the web or in print, brings to the floodwaters of information. I haven't the time to read all the dispatches of the Associated Press, for example. It's fantastic what they put out, it's extremely good, from all over the world. I like when someone acts as a filter.

If I want to spend the rest of my life reading one day's output of information, which is about what it would take, OK fine. But I personally prefer calibration from an aggregator or newspaper, where the No. 1 story is one they consider important, [and] they're usually right.

If Rupert Murdoch wants to charge for content online, he will succeed in so far, but no further than what he provides that is unique and can't be found anywhere. It doesn't seem to me that if he wants to charge it will be a blow to universal freedom and liberty of mankind.

It's a fascinating time, I think. I do believe that with all the qualifications I've said - [such as] the uncertain accuracy of the web - nonetheless the access to speeches, documents is unparalleled with the ease of gathering information. If I had had that access when I was an editor or coming up, it would have made my life so much easier. As it was, everything took so much longer.

[The web] is going to end up being a tremendous advantage, providing we can work out the financial structure. I think we'll see newspapers survive, being printed at home. Or you'll have a local print shop, so that rather than waiting for the newspapers to arrive by truck, which is 30 percent at least of a newspaper's cost, you'll go in and push a button, and it will take your dollar bills without anyone having to be there. And it will print the newspaper for you while you wait. It will take seven minutes. There's a terrific future for print in my view and it gives me great heart.

I love craftsmanship of any kind, a job well done either by my chiropractor or carpenter, and I am addicted to print, the type, the ink. But my basic passion is journalism and I can't live without being online.

I think a lot of newspapers have lost touch with that sense of community, which so impressed me as a teenager when I had to knock on people's doors.

My wife [Tina Brown] co-founded the Daily Beast, so I have no hostility to the web or Internet. A number of print friends of mine regard it as the worst thing that's ever happened, but I don't.

I had been at the newspaper for a few months. It wasn't regarded as the paper, it was their paper. There was a sense of community because they reported, we reported, I reported the little things, the whist drives, the weddings, the funerals, the little speeches. In one sense it was the most boring copy in the world to anyone picking it up, but, on the other hand, it was crucial to the people who lived in those communities.

When came the invasion of privacy.That kind of thing turns the newspaper from a friendly organ - not necessarily appeasing everybody - into the enemy. It's one reason why newspapers have suffered circulation falls.

Internet news cycles are by the minute, and any fool can take a headline from the Associated Press and send it out as news.

I wrote about Bosnia at the time. Somebody looked out their window and saw gangsters coming down the street and doing ethnic cleansing. I said that was the thing that would happen in the future, someone phoning in what they were seeing on the scene. Whether it's the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, Drudge Report or the BBC, all those reports, you have to assume there's a real person [who] has credibility.

The credibility of a newspaper or news magazine is essential so you can check it for accuracy. I'm not saying it's not valuable. One can make a case for just running everything. Just run it! That's one of the advantages of the web, you can run everything - but you don't help the reader find out what's important.

We always talk about how everyone is unifocal. You can't possibly be interested in jazz and Beethoven. Of course you can. You can't both be reading a newspaper and be online. Of course you can. We shouldn't be obsessed with a gun to your head, 'You either read a newspaper or die!'

I think America has a brilliant future.

I often see cases of Internet news where there's no reconciliation for what's gone before and what's newly arrived. That training for me - which was absolutely brutal and I was terrified - was so important, especially later in life when one was faced with conflicting stories and conflicting evidence.

Propaganda is persuading people to make up their minds while withholding some of the facts from them.

The democratization of news is fine and splendid, but it's not reporting. It's based on a fragment of information picked up from television or the web, and people are sounding off about something that's not necessarily true.

Transmitting information is easier than creating understanding.

People were murdered for the camera; and some photographers and a television camera crew departed without taking a picture in the hope that in the absence of cameramen acts might not be committed. Others felt that the mob was beyond appeal to mercy. They stayed and won Pulitzer Prizes. Were they right?

Television and radio are what I call sequential media; they're not simultaneous media. With simultaneous media, you can scan your eye down an electronic or print page and pick among six or seven stories you might like and want to read. With television and radio, you have to wait until the guy's finished talking about the balloon boy, which I don't have the slightest interest in, to find out that all hell's broken loose in Baghdad. Because they've chosen that day to start with the balloon boy.

Some blogs have become the best check on monopoly mainstream journalism, and they provide a surprisingly frequent source of initiative reporting.

By the end of this century, of course, America is the dominant world power, economically and militarily, and it has not only enlarged the freedoms of its own citizens -- which was very circumscribed in 1889 -- but by 1989 it has enlarged the freedoms of millions and millions of people around the world.

I don't think the pictures and words can be separated, ... If you get an amazing photograph, like the dust clouds blowing over a small town in Kansas, it's not enough to look at the picture; (the readers) want to know, 'How did this happen, that half the farming soil of a whole state is blown away?' And then you want to know, 'Well, what happened to the people, and what kind of condition were they in? It's in the middle of the '30s, and most of them were unemployed, and how did they get out of it? Why didn't the politicians act sooner?'