Quotes About Reporting

The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don't participate. Let Big Brother do the singing and dancing for you. Be a reporter. Be a good witness. A grateful member of the audience.

During the first nineteen months of the epidemic, the New York Times wrote about it a total of seven times:

the sailors had a moment before reporting for duty, they might relieve themselves, an unpleasant, even ridiculous chore

The Three Pillars of PACT. Outlaws promotion of un-American values and behavior. Requires all citizens to report potential threats to our society. And there, beneath Sadie's finger: Protects children from environments espousing harmful views.

If it's called the USA Today, why is all the news from yesterday? BAM. Busted!

Media is a word that has come to mean bad journalism

The new breed of reporter doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, doesn't have sex beyond reproducing, and most importantly—doesn't believe. They don't believe they are there to question everything. They are there to print whatever is told to them. The news is dead, my friend. Buried under a mountain of full color advertising, and six-digit deposit slips.

I love this book. When other U.S. reporters were licking Ken Lay's loafers, Leopold went for Enron's thieving throat. Leopold is a journalist who insists on real investigative reporting–inside documents, inside sources, hard knife-in-the-gut evidence–detective-style reporting that is just about illegal in the U.S.A. Bravo and my personal Pulitzer to Jason Leopold. Every journalist in America should read this, then quit or riot.

You read the papers and you watch television, so you know the kind of spider-brained, commercially poisoned piece-of-crap reporting you get in America.

Funny the way those newspaper men veer about when they get wind of a new opening. Weathercocks. Hot and cold in the same breath. Wouldn't know which to believe. One story good till you hear the next. Go for one another baldheaded in the papers and then all blows over. Hail fellow well met the next moment.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, if you start the clock, then 47 journalists, reporters, cameramen, photographers have been killed in Russia since the fall of communism. That makes it the third most deadly country on Earth to practice journalism. That's not a record to be proud of.

Journalism took me around the world. I worked in London for ten years and reported on the collapse of the Soviet Union, the troubles in Northern Ireland, and the first Gulf War.

I studied journalism at The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. I did my graduate work at Emerson in Boston, and I was actually a reporter for a year in New York and New Jersey. It dawned on me that I wasn't cut out for that line of work. I mean... there's a certain thing that really good reports have that I just didn't.

I can't think in terms of journalism without thinking in terms of political ends. Unless there's been a reaction, there's been no journalism. It's cause and effect.

Unless you work for '60 Minutes', your life is: You do stories about things, and nothing happens as a result.

The headlines are never in the news! And so, what I am saying is the news is never on the headlines

"The New York Times" is reporting correctly that women had accused a presidential candidate of sexual assault. Now that's news on any level. I mean you can't argue that that's not news.

You know it's always amazed me - I think the most startling thing that's happened in the last couple of decades is that there is no sort of objective reporting anymore.

The corruption in reporting starts very early. It's like the police reporting on the police.

Never look for the story in the 'lede.' Reporters are required to put what's happened up top, but the practiced pundit places a nugget of news, even a startling insight, halfway down the column, directed at the politiscenti. When pressed for time, the savvy reader starts there.

I think it's important for the public to know, great reporting starts with a publisher who has guts and an editor who has guts.

I think that the press has a duty and an obligation to report on local government, state government, federal government - to be aggressive, to do its job. And its job is to report on whatever it's covering.

As anchorman of the CBS Evening News, I signed off my nightly broadcasts for nearly two decades with a simple statement: 'And that's the way it is.' To me, that encapsulates the newsman's highest ideal: to report the facts as he sees them, without regard for the consequences or controversy that may ensue.

When there are falsehoods and ludicrous statements made at briefings, we've got to call that out.