Having learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surprised by historians who take them as primary source for knowing what really happened. I think newspapers should be read for information about how contemporaries construed events, rather than for reliable knowledge of events themselves. Robert Darnton
About This Quote

I used to believe in newspapers, but after learning how they are made, I stopped believing in them. The only reliable source of information is the historians who write them. It’s interesting to note that while newspapers can be trusted for knowledge of events, they are not trusted for knowledge of events themselves. This is because historians are the only ones who can accurately report on events without bias. They, therefore, should be the primary source for what happened.

Source: The Case For Books: Past, Present, And Future

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More Quotes By Robert Darnton
  1. Having learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surprised by historians who take them as primary source for knowing what really happened. I think newspapers should be read for information about how contemporaries construed events,...
  2. As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the...
  3. People sometimes announce that we have entered 'the information age' as if information did not exist in other times. I think that every age was an age of information, each in its own way and according to the available media.
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