"We must express the view, based on our empirical observations, that a substantial number of journalists are ignorant, lazy, opinionated, and intellectually dishonest. The profession is heavily cluttered with aged hacks toiling through a miasma of mounting decrepitude and often alcoholism, and even more so with arrogant and abrasive youngsters who substitute 'commitment' for insight. The product of their impassioned intervention in public affairs is more often confusion than lucidity."
"All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation."
Source: A Brief to the Special Senate Committee on the Mass Media from the Sherbrooke Record. 1969.
About the author
Conrad Black
Businessman, Author
Conrad Black is a Canadian-born author and former media mogul known for his influential writings on politics and history.
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"[Canada's social welfare system is] an overgenerous reinsurance policy for an underachieving people."
"Given the genocidal belligerence of Iranian threats against Israel, it is hard to take issue with Israel's right to preemptive self-defense."
"There can be no return to prosperity while the government (of Ontario) believes that taking money from the people who have earned it and giving it away to the people who haven't, in exchange for their votes and regardless of merit, is the essence of fairness."
"The argument of socialists, that people really want to share, beyond a reasonable level of charity, is rubbish, though it is espoused by a lot of rich, pious hypocrites who want to share only enough to avoid widespread starvation, mob violence, and government seizure of more of their incomes."
"A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical."