Quote Investigator ↗ traces this family of sayings to a little framed placard on a Chicago editor’s desk, reported in the New York trade weekly The Fourth Estate on 30 November 1918 — and already unattributed even then. This exact wording is documented in the London motoring weekly The Motor on 14 December 1937, credited only to an unnamed editor of a big-circulation newspaper. The earliest Orwell attribution QI finds is a January 1999 item in the New York Post, and in a different variant; QI calls the Orwell link “very weak” and labels the adage anonymous.
“News Is What Somebody Does Not Want You To Print. All the Rest Is Advertising” Not George Orwell. An anonymous newspaper adage: the earliest strong match documented by Quote Investigator is an unattributed placard reported in The Fourth Estate, 30 November 1918; this exact wording appears in The Motor (London), 14 December 1937, credited only to an unnamed editor. Orwell's name was first attached in 1999. — Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to George Orwell. Use the credit shown above instead.
Can you use it?
? We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.
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In context
Evoking the themes of truth, power and doubt. Theme: "News Is What Somebody Does Not Want You To Print. All the Rest Is Advertising". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "News Is What Somebody Does Not Want You To Print. All the Rest Is Advertising". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
Where the line actually comes from
Attributed to
George Orwell — earliest sighting January 1999
Actually
An anonymous newspaper adage, documented from 1918
Earliest source
The Fourth Estate: A Newspaper for the Makers of Newspapers
This exact wording
The Motor (London), 14 December 1937 — credited only to an unnamed editor
“Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news,” is the sentiment expressed in a little framed placard on the desk of L. E. Edwardson, day city editor of the Chicago Herald and Examiner.
The Fourth Estate · 30 November 1918
The earliest strong match in Quote Investigator’s chronology — and already, in 1918, an unsigned motto on somebody’s desk rather than anyone’s coined line. The compressed wording people quote today (“News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising”) is documented nineteen years later in The Motor, again with no named author.
1918 — The New York trade weekly The Fourth Estate reports a framed placard on a Chicago editor’s desk. It is the earliest strong match Quote Investigator ↗ has found, and it carries no attribution. By 1925 a Mississippi paper is already calling a version of it “the old saying.”
1937 — The London motoring weekly The Motor prints the compressed wording quoted today, putting it in the mouth of an unnamed editor of a big-circulation newspaper who used it to calm his directors after a big story. QI verified this citation with scans ↗.
1930–1988 — The famous names arrive: Walter Winchell gives it to Hearst, Jasper More gives it to Lord Northcliffe in the Commons, Malcolm Muggeridge gets the “public relations” rewrite, John Humphrys names Lord Rothermere. Barry Popik’s file ↗ tracks the same drift through American papers and calls the saying one of unknown authorship.
1999 — Orwell’s name is attached for the first time QI can document, in the New York Post. The Wikiquote page for Orwell does not list the line in either its Disputed or its Misattributed section, and The Independent’s fake-Orwell list ↗ states it cannot be found in any of his works.
The line has no identified author, so there is no rightsholder to name. Its earliest documented ancestor — the unattributed placard text reported in The Fourth Estate on 30 November 1918 — is a pre-1931 American trade-paper item and would be out of copyright as printed, but that is a different sentence from the one quoted here. The exact popular wording is first documented in The Motor in December 1937 with no named author, so quotle.info asserts no copyright status for it.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Six owners before Orwell
This is an unusually well-travelled saying. Before it reached George Orwell it had been credited, in print or in Parliament, to at least five other figures — and Quote Investigator ↗ finds documentary evidence for none of them originating it.
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The claim you will see todayGeorge Orwell From 1999
The earliest Orwell attribution Quote Investigator documents is a January 1999 item in the New York Post, and in the “public relations” variant rather than this one. The Independent’s Top 10 fake George Orwell quotations ↗, guest-edited by Orwell Society trustee Benedict Cooper, lists it fourth and says its origin is unclear but it cannot be found in any of Orwell’s works. The Fallacy Files reaches the same verdict, classifying it apocryphal ↗.
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The oldest famous name attachedWilliam Randolph Hearst 1930
Walter Winchell’s syndicated column ascribed a version to Hearst in 1930, and the British editor Brian R. Roberts credited him again in 1953 and 1955. Quote Investigator ↗ thinks it possible Hearst used the adage but finds no substantive evidence that he crafted it — and it was already in print, unattributed, twelve years before Winchell’s column.
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The British claimantLord Northcliffe (Alfred Harmsworth) 1968
The MP Jasper More credited Northcliffe with a near-identical wording in the Commons in 1968, and a Melbourne paper repeated the credit in 1976. Harmsworth did write, in 1903, that a politician’s business is to prevent certain news being printed — but that is a related observation, not this sentence, as QI’s chronology ↗ shows.
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Later claimantsMalcolm Muggeridge, Lord Rothermere, Katharine Graham 1979–2010
Muggeridge was credited in 1979 with the “public relations” rewrite, John Humphrys attached it to Lord Rothermere in 1998, and a 2010 mediabistro list gave it to Katharine Graham. All are downstream repetitions in Quote Investigator’s chronology ↗, decades after the saying was already in print.
✓Quote Investigator’s conclusion, based on current data, is that the adage is anonymous ↗ — a newsroom motto that was already unsigned when it first reached print in 1918.
Context
Why this one sticks to Orwell
The line is a piece of newsroom folk wisdom that has spent a century looking for an owner. Quote Investigator’s chronology shows it circulating as an unsigned motto in 1918, framed on an editor’s desk in Chicago, and being handed to a succession of press barons afterwards — Hearst in 1930, Northcliffe in 1968, Rothermere in 1998, Katharine Graham by 2010. Orwell was the last to arrive, in 1999, and by then the wording had already drifted from “advertising” to “public relations.”
It sticks because it sounds like him: terse, anti-cant, suspicious of official language. But Orwell put the thought differently and better, in a place that is documented. In his proposed preface to Animal Farm, first published in the Times Literary Supplement on 15 September 1972, he argued that liberty means “the right to tell people what they do not want to hear” ↗. That sentence is really his. The one on the mug is not.
The saying was already anonymous in 1918 — a framed motto on a Chicago editor’s desk, credited to nobody.
Why the wording keeps changing
The adage has no fixed text because it has no author to fix it. Quote Investigator records the 1918 form as a two-part contrast (“whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news”), the compressed 1937 form that matches the popular wording here, and a 1979 mutation that swaps “advertising” for “public relations” under Malcolm Muggeridge’s name.
The Orwell version that circulates most widely today — “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations” — is that later public-relations branch, not the 1918 original. Some outlets that use it hedge it properly: Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit prefaces it with “As George Orwell is said to have remarked” ↗.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Day city editor, Chicago Herald and Examiner · earliest documented carrier of the adage, 1918
Edwardson did not write this line. His desk is simply where it first surfaces in print. In November 1918 the New York trade weekly The Fourth Estate: A Newspaper for the Makers of Newspapers reported a little framed placard on the desk of L. E. Edwardson, day city editor of the Chicago Herald and Examiner, carrying what Quote Investigator ↗ calls the earliest strongly matching expression it has found. The item gave no attribution, and none has been established since — the placard was already repeating something the trade said to itself. Barry Popik, working the same ground, calls it flatly “an old newspaper saying of unknown authorship” ↗.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest strong match
Earliest strong match documented by Quote Investigator: filler item, The Fourth Estate: A Newspaper for the Makers of Newspapers (New York: Fourth Estate Publishing Company), 30 November 1918, p. 18, col. 4. This exact wording: “You’ll Be Interested To Know” by “Lacuna” (pen name), The Motor, 14 December 1937, p. 917, col. 1. Chronology per “Quote Origin: News Is What Somebody Does Not Want You To Print. All the Rest Is Advertising,” Quote Investigator, 20 January 2013.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘News Is What Somebody Does Not Want You To Print. All the Rest Is Advertising’?” Last verified 1 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/news-is-what-somebody-does-not-want-you-to-print-all-the/