Claud Cockburn quotes

Evidently there are plenty of people in journalism who have neither got what they liked nor quite grown to like what they get. They write pieces they do not much enjoy writing, for papers they totally despise, and the sad process ends by ruining their style and disintegrating their personality, two developments which in a writer cannot be separate, since his personality and style must progress or deteriorate together, like a married couple in a country where death is the only permissible divorce. (Claud Cockburn)
There is nothing quite so terrifying as a mad sheep.
Claud Cockburn
The hired journalist, I thought, ought to realize that he is partly in the entertainment business and partly in the advertising business - advertising either goods, or a cause, or a government. He just has to make up his mind whom he wants to entertain, and what he wants to advertise.
Claud Cockburn
If I wrote a book about England I should call it What About Wednesday Week? which is what English people say when they are making what they believe to be an urgent appointment.
Claud Cockburn
Never believe anything until it has been officially denied.
Claud Cockburn
A newspaper is always a weapon in somebody's hands.
Claud Cockburn
Never underestimate the effectiveness of a straight cash bribe.
Claud Cockburn
A wartime Minister of Information is compelled, in the national interest, to such continuous acts of duplicity that even his natural hair must grow to resemble a wig.
Claud Cockburn
Since becoming a journalist I had often heard the advice to "believe nothing until it has been officially denied."
Claud Cockburn
Someone [on the staff of The Times] had invented a game – a competition with a small prize for the winner – to see who could write the dullest headline. It had to be a genuine headline, that is to say one which was actually printed in the next morning's newspaper. I won it only once with a headline which announced: "Small Earthquake in Chile. Not many dead."
Claud Cockburn
He [Brendan Bracken] had been upset by my observation that a wartime Minister of Information was compelled, in the national interest, to such continuous acts of duplicity that even his natural hair must grow to resemble a wig. (Claud Cockburn)
A devout and serious Christian, she was often bothered by what she read of socialists because she could not, instantly and absolutely, see where they were so wrong. To her horrified ear, they kept sounding as though they had ideas rather like Christ's.
Claud Cockburn