Zitat des Tages von Joseph Pulitzer:
It is to such men as Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson and Jackson and Franklin, all most lowly born, that we owe most of our greatness as a nation.
The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.
Publicity, publicity, publicity is the greatest moral factor and force in our public life.
Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together.
An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery.
I am deeply interested in the progress and elevation of journalism, having spent my life in that profession, regarding it as a noble profession and one of unequaled importance for its influence upon the minds and morals of the people.
The American people want something terse, forcible, picturesque, striking - something that will arrest their attention, enlist their sympathy, arouse their indignation, stimulate their imagination, convince their reason, awaken their conscience.
Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light.
A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will in time produce a people as base as itself.
What I say is that there are not half a dozen papers in the United States which tamper with the news, which publish what they know to be false. But if I thought I had done no better than that, I would be ashamed to own a paper. You have to make everyone connected with the paper believe that accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a woman.
I would rather have one article a day of this sort; and these ten or twenty lines might readily represent a whole day's hard work in the way of concentrated, intense thinking and revision, polish of style, weighing of words.
Principles, convictions and motives are neither sold nor bargained for!
