> George Orwell said journalism is “printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”
Orwell? I'm pretty sure it was Lord Northcliffe (founder of the Daily Mail in late 19th century) who said "News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising."
Yeah, it wasn't Orwell. It just hopped into Orwell's orbit because he has the greater mass. Quotes get acquired by market leaders over time.
Why do I say it wasn't Orwell? Because https://www.google.com/search?q=everything+else+is+public+re... produces no source, just a plethora of (extremely recent) attributions. Similarly with Google Book Search. If you go back to 2003 you can see variants of the quote being attributed to David Brinkley (http://books.google.com/books?ei=5WjvT-6JKsrgqAGi9cCFBA&...). Changing wording is a tell-tale sign of misattribution, by the way, because when quotes are severed from any canonical text they become free to evolve.
Probably the OP got the misquote from goodreads.com because that's the top result Google gives for it, and the OP links to the goodreads.com entry for Orwell (though not to the quote).
There are many more and much older citations for the Northcliffe quote you mention, though the original source is apparently lost in time, or at least lost to 5 minutes of googling.
I find it interesting that the quote hopped to Orwell instead of to Rupert Murdoch. Almost by definition, there are only a few possibilities for any hop. Murdoch is the natural inheritor of the social category (press baron) but Orwell is the more natural heir to the content. But by being attributed to Orwell, the quote acquires an ethical connotation it didn't have before. Now it's of a piece with "speaking truth to power" and "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" (http://mikeswritingworkshop.blogspot.com/2010/03/comfort-aff...), which I doubt Lord Northcliffe would have endorsed as his mission.
That's probably also why "advertising" flipped to "public relations" in the phrasing. Advertising is legitimate in a newspaper while public relations is sinister. So these things undergo semantic hops as well.
Thanks for this investigation! What I like about the Northcliffe attribution is that the guy was not a saint; he practically invented tabloïds. That lends a very practical aspect to the quote -- secrets sell.
Journalists are not fighting holy wars, they are printing secrets, and that's what makes them good journalists. People who print things "that nobody wants to suppress" aren't journalists. They're more like... "useful idiots"?
Now the problem with the OP is that his post has absolutely nothing to do with good or bad journalism; it's precisely a PR stunt for Hipmunk, which I certainly don't object to (AFAIK Hipmunk is a very fine service); I object to the fact of calling that piece "journalism" -- and invoking Orwell on top of it!!
Orwell? I'm pretty sure it was Lord Northcliffe (founder of the Daily Mail in late 19th century) who said "News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising."