51 Quotes by Harold Evans

We're all told that people are busy, and have short attention spans, and yet these stories are so marvelous, and really ought to be read.

Once we get further into the irrigation season and start using more water, we'll get all of it flushed out.

It's a story of terrific heroism (with) many, many dramatic stories of individuals,

[We need to] protect copyright at all costs. Don't do cheap deals with Google and these other cyber-monsters. Recognize that the creative artist has to be maintained.

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.

Journalism is not easy. It's the first rough draft. I don't think you need to wait around until you have the definitive thing. You record what's there; don't delude yourself that this is the ultimate historical view.

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.

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.