Quotes About Reporting

When I worry about privacy, I worry about peer-to-peer invasion of privacy. About the fact that anytime anything of any note happens, there are three arms holding cell phones with cameras in them or video records capturing the event ready to go on the nightly news, if necessary.

Being in Vietnam and being around a major story of the time was always a great shot of adrenaline.

My journalistic heroes are all the guys like Peter Arnett of Vietnam, and my style in journalism is you got to stand there, and you got to see it with your own eyes.

I want to stress the importance of being fair to our readers. You should not impose your own view and prejudice on the readers and try to lead them to a conclusion. As a reader, I understand what a fair report is.

There is no national data to show precisely how many adoptions fail, or track how many children need additional help, and states are not required to track or report the figures.

Always get the facts first. You can distort them later.

Reporting is all about legwork, getting out and finding the story. But all the stories are on the top floors, so you have to learn to climb stairs. That's what reporting is all about, climbing tenement stairs.

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrustive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out .

The genuflection toward 'fairness' is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what 'fairness' has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does.

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

There is no such thing as a fact. There is only how you saw the fact, in a given moment. How you reported the fact. How your brain processed that fact. There is no extrication of the storyteller from the story.

As early as 1817 the Prussian ambassador was reporting to Berlin that Rothschild was 'easily the most enterprising business man in the country. He is, moreover, a man upon whom one can rely and with whom the Government here does considerable business. He is also … honest and intelligent.'[

Forty years ago the chances of journalists reporting - or the authorities even prosecuting - a pro athlete were practically nil.

Scientific results that aren't reported might as well not exist. They're like the sound of one hand clapping. For scientists, communication isn't only a responsibility, it's our chief pleasure.

You can find that sort of regularity in Stock Exchange quotations. [Expressing his lack of confidence in reported regularities in the periodic classification of elements.]

I was first to break the news about the death of Lady Diana. The CNN team couldn't get into makeup fast enough.

I probably have reported, probably more about the unusual animal death stories then anyone else on this planet.

Quando la tragedia umana si è compiuta, la si passa ai giornalisti affinché, banalizzandola, la trasformino in spettacolo.

There's not much news in the news anymore. The lies they tell don't leave a lot of time for the facts about anything.

The news isn't all the news, Jonah. Not by a long shot. It's just what reporters want to tell you about. Riots come and go, wars come and go, but under the tumult, day after day, century after century, millions of people are doing nice things for one another, making sacrifices, mostly small things, but it's all those little kindnesses that hold civilization together, all those people who live quiet lives and never make the news.

It's not tragedy, the way they report it, not horror, certainly not war reporting. It's all spectacle, and once you let yourself see it that way, your soul begins to turn to dust.

I can't say that exhaustive research and reporting will guarantee a great story, but I've never been able to pull one off without it.