Quotes About Reporting

If someone on Instagram sees that a friend is in a harmful situation, they can report it.

As a reporter, I approach every situation knowing that everyone has his or her own agenda. It's not a bad thing; it's just a fact.

In Iraq, embedding allows us to put reporters in situations that would otherwise be too dangerous for them.

Every reporter inhales skepticism. You interview people, and they lie. You face public figures, diligently making notes or taping what is said, and they perform their interviews to fit a calculated script. The truth, alas, is always elusive.

Most interviewers are looking for a headline. They're not skilled. They're looking for shock value.

The thing I love about reporting is being able to blend in with any group, whether that's neo-Nazis or pedophiles.

When I got a little older, I started writing for the high school newspaper, The Maroon Wave, and that's when I fell in love with journalism.

Obviously I love doing newsmaker interviews, and if I can contribute in any way to that, I would love to. I love reporting, getting out in the field and talking to people about various issues.

Without local newspapers there's no one to tell you when somebody's been fined for having rats in their kitchens.

celebrity. The number one topic on network evening newscasts for the decade was crime, even though crime rates nationally were plummeting during the period.

In newspapers, as various studies have found, stories began to focus less on what candidates said and more on the tactical motives for their statements.

After Vietnam and Watergate, and later the advent of twenty-four-hour cable news, journalism became noticeably more subjective and judgmental.18 Coverage was focused more on mediating what public people were saying than simply reporting it.

I think journalism gets measured by the quality of information it presents, not the drama or the pyretechnics associated with us

A heartfelt thanks to Evelyn M. Duffy, my assistant on five books that have covered four presidents. President Trump presents a particular hurdle because of the deep emotions and passions he brings out in supporters and critics. Evelyn immediately grasped that the challenge was to get new information, authenticate it and put it in context while reporting as deeply as possible inside the White House.

Reporters may believe they control the story, but the story always controls the reporters.

Bob and I [Carl Bernstein]embraced and held each other briefly. There was a whole lifetime of emotions and journalism in this moment.

The reporter had to set his or her own course, had to push back against editors at times, to roam and be free to explore, to defy the conventional wisdom if necessary. It meant the reporters, whatever they covered, had to find the bookkeepers and the Deep Throats if possible. At the same time, as we had just been reminded, reporters need editors. In the end we are collaborators and they make the final calls.

talking in elegant paragraphs. He also had a

But including it, even in scaled-down form, in one of the most important briefings the intelligence chiefs might ever present to a president-elect made little sense to me. It would be as if I had reported and written one of the most serious, complex stories for The Washington Post that I had ever done—and then provided an appendix of unverified allegations. Oh, by the way, here is a to-do list for further reporting and we're publishing it.

Bob Woodward

The president maintained his upbeat rhetoric in the early weeks of the virus had been deliberate. "I wanted to always play it down," Trump told me, as I reported earlier in this book. "I still like playing it down, because I don't want to create a panic.

Bob Woodward

Chris wasn't blameless, either. Taking a grieving, troubled boy into his home had to have been hard—especially when he'd been building his own family with Christopher Jr. and Ireland on the way. But he'd accepted the role of stepfather when he married Elizabeth. He shared responsibility for pursuing justice for a wounded and exploited child. Hell, a stranger would have an obligation to report the crime.

Tonight was awful. It was the combination of everything. Of the play Goodbye My Fancy, of wanting, in a juvenile way, to be, like the heroine, a reporter in the trenches, to be loved by a man who admired me, who understood me as much as I understood myself.