Quotes About Reporting

You can be a great reporter and not be such a great talk show host.

We are in the business of gathering the news. We're not in the business of talking about the news.

To be a good reporter, writing about war, you have to write about the people. It's not about the tanks or the RPGs or military strategy. It's always about the effect war has on civilians, on society, and how it disrupts and destroys lives.

Lucie disappeared on Saturday, July 1, 2000, at the midpoint of the first year of the twenty-first century. It took a week for the news to reach the world at large. The first report appeared the following Sunday, July 9, when a British newspaper carried a short article about a missing tourist named "Lucy Blackman." There were more detailed stories the next day in the British and Japanese papers.

At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don't really think of myself as 'writing humor.' I'm simply reporting on the world I observe, which is frequently hilarious.

For the next two years, journalists would dishonestly report that the U.S. president had called neo-Nazis 'fine people'.

TIME Magazine probably publishes many facts, but since its founding in the early 1920's I have been on the spot eight or nine times when something that wound up as a news story in TIME happened. Not once—not once—did the TIME Magazine story match what I saw and heard.

In almost all other professions a man must be able to observe carefully and report accurately what he has seen. Those qualifications are unnecessary for journalists, however, since their job is to write sensational stories that sell newspapers.

The great gulf between the story told by the young reporters and the story that military people knew as their truth may be the reason that, almost a half century later, the Vietnam War remains the source of a cultural rift in America. Today a small but growing group of writers is looking back and finding a different story than the one told by many reporters of the day.

And my job needs a fair bit of lying, to tell the truth. - What are you, a reporter?

He sent for the Long-Eared Hearer and asked him to listen carefully and report what was going on in the big world. It seems, said the Hearer, after listening for awhile, that the women in America have clubs. Are there spikes in them? asked Ruggedo, yawning. I cannot hear any spikes, Your Majesty, was the reply. Then their clubs are not as good as my sceptre. What else do you hear?' There's a war. Bah! there's always a war. What else?

Contradictory to my religion, I think, is journalism.

I've always believed that who a reporter votes for, what religion they are, who they love, should not be something they have to discuss publicly.

To win respect, the networks seem to feel they have to keep absurdly overstating their anchors' reporting cred

Written language may have been conceived as a modest way of describing reality, but it gradually became a powerful way to reshape reality. When official reports collided with objective reality, it was often reality that had to give way.

En una encuesta tras otra, los costarricenses informan de niveles mucho más elevados de satisfacción vital que los singapurenses.

My fault, again. Dr. Blake said I also handled the beads incident wrong when I reported that a couple of weeks later.

Police not enforcing laws results in a high crime rate that is formally reported as a low crime rate in police statistics.

Journalism is the only thinkable alternative to working.

Sexual assault is the single least-reported violent crime. And when it is reported, the victims are blamed and shamed. Or not believed. Or silenced. Punished. Or their attackers are never prosecuted at all.

Sexual assault is the single least-reported violent crime. And when it is reported, the victims are blamed and shamed.

The media—stenographers to power.

Journalists are not entertainers. We are reporters. We go to places that are unpopular. We broadcast voices that are controversial. We are not here to win popularity contests. We are here to cover the issues critical to a democratic society. We have to pressure the media, to shame the media into going into these forgotten places where so many are sent to waste away in silence.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.