Harold Evans Quotes

For 50 Years My Father Worked For The Railroad.

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 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.

When I First Came To The United States In 1956 I Fell In Love With Things - Mainly The Vitality And The Freedoms.

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.

Throughout America's Young History There Has Been A Necessary Tension Between The Individual And The Group.

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.

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!'

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.