Geneva Overholser Quotes

United States, Journalist
March 3, 1948

Geneva Overholser is a journalism consultant and adviser. A former editor of the Des Moines Register now living in New York City, Overholser speaks and writes about the future of journalism. She advises numerous organizations, including the Trust Project, Report for America, SciLine, the Democracy Fund and the Public Face of Science project at the Academy of American Arts and Sciences. She serves on the boards of the Rita Allen Foundation, Northwestern University in Qatar and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism Foundation.

Also known as Consultant

Let's start with some of the reasons that the press holds its tongue and some of the things that you don't know because of this. We'll begin with squeamishness, prudishness, timidity and an overdeveloped fear of offending someone... So much for squeamishness and prudishness. There are many other reasons that we editors fail you in this pact you and we have. Let me name a few more: Orthodoxy, conventional thinking, a misplaced pleasure at being on the inside, incompetence and laziness.

Geneva Overholser
- Reason
- Pleasure
- Failing
We suffer from a terrible poverty of civic discourse in this country. Surely, it is outside of America's best traditions to send the signal that patriotism is mindless emotion, that leadership is avoiding saying tough things, that citizenship is toeing the line. But such is the result of a lack of openness, our nervousness with debate.

Geneva Overholser

And all of you, all your lives, should be telling those of us in the media leadership positions to tell the whole truth and calling us to complain when we don't. Break this know-nothing pact now and you will have taken as mighty a step as you can as an individual to help see to it that we as a nation move together toward a lively, hopeful, confident, and all-embracing future.

Geneva Overholser
Power is the ability to make change.

Geneva Overholser
- Ability