Prof. Bill Kovarik, PhD

About the Jprof ...


Bill Kovarik is a Professor of Communication and coordinator of the journalism program at Radford University in the Blue Ridge mountains of southwestern Virginia. He served as the 2009 Canwest Global Media Fellow at the University of Western Ontario and has also served as a visiting professor at Virginia Tech.

Kovarik is a journalist and historian who has worked with wire services, daily newspapers and national news magazines. He teaches science and environment writing, journalism, web design, media history media law, and peace studies. He is serving on the board of the Society of Environmental Journalists. He also writes for Appalachian Voice and other science and environmental publications. More >>

Prof. K's Historical research

• How New York World editor Walter Lippmann rescued The Radium Girls

Random quotes about a well-known profession

"A good reporter is a work of God." -- Rudyard Kipling

"Facing the press is more difficult than bathing a leper." -- Mother Teresa

"A journalist is a reporter out of a job." -- Mark Twain

"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers." -- T. S. Eliot

"[Journalists are] a lower quality of human being, who'll do anything for a story. (...) At press awards they jeer, boo, fight, get pissed, and
that's just the cream." -- Max Clifford, in an interview for the Radio Times

"Everywhere I go, I'm asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them." -- Flannery O'Connor

"In terms of ravenous egos, sensitive ambition and backstabbing, the atmosphere was actually diluted compared with the behaviour of most
foreign correspondents." -- Anthony Loyd, The Times

"To a newspaperman, a human being is an item with skin wrapped around it." -- Fred Allen

"No wonder the newspaper is rotten. We need more drunkards." -- Actor Edward G. Robinson in "Five Star Final"

"The press is the enemy" -- Richard Nixon

"If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he
becomes a journalist." -- Norman Mailer

"The way I had it is all gone now. The bars are gone, the drinkers, gone. There remain the smartest, healthiest newspeople in the history of the
business. And they are so boring that they kill the business right in front of you." -- Jimmy Breslin, newspaper columnist, in a Sept. 1996
interview with Joan Smith for the San Francisco Examiner

"[Journalism] is full of lying, cheating, drunken ... unethical people. It's a wonderful profession." -- Piers Morgan, Daily Mirror

"I have spent half my life trying to get away from journalism, but I am still mired in it--a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange
seedy world full of misfits and drunkards and failures." -- Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

Every journalist has a novel inside them -- and for most, that's where it should stay. -- Unknown.

"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time, when the United States is a service and information economy ... when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical facilities in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media ..". -- Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World, Random House, 1995