Quotes About Journalism

As much as the Pulitzer is the hallmark of journalism, I think what I love the most is when somebody says they took my column and it's in their wallet. I have had people open their wallet and show me a corner of a column.

It's CNN's bigger problem that CNN wants to deny reality. I, too, used to drink the Kool-Aid that it was a top journalism operation that reports without bias. Now that I'm outside the walls of traditional media, I know there is no such thing.

You know how most kids have posters of sports heroes on their walls? They gave me reams of the old news copy, and I had those taped in my bedroom. And I would practice reading the news.

The idea of being a foreign correspondent and wandering the world and witnessing great events, having adventures and covering the activities of world leaders, appealed to me greatly. It was a very glamorous life in those days.

I often stumble upon new stories when I am wandering on the roads in search of information.

I actually have great respect for the professionals on both sides, journalism designers in the fashion industry, and I wanted to make a movie that celebrated what they did as much as poke fun at the challenges of their lives.

Rather than doing the kind of fact-checking that normally goes with a story, you ran with certain stories for not wanting to get beat. There's a pressure that exists in your profession. I would be surprised in any honest exchange that you say that doesn't exist.

By the way, you won't put that thing in about me wanting to have sex on a football pitch, will you?

I started off wanting very much to be a newscaster.

A lot of the stories are internal. They leak it to me wanting to get attention, wanting to get that headline. More times than not, I will not give it to them.

I think it's foolish to interview someone who's just promoting a movie that they're in and ask if they consider themselves a feminist. That's not about feminism; that's about the journalist wanting to gauge how much this person is aware of the world or is aware of the feminist movement.

I simply told people what I thought about the state of the war in Vietnam, and it was that we better get out of this.

For a war correspondent to miss an invasion is like refusing a date with Lana Turner.

I was planning, I told everybody, to take him on the road with me. At the very least I fully expected to keep up my hectic pace, and my passion as a war correspondent.

When you're a war correspondent, the reader is for you because the reader is saying, 'Gee, I wouldn't want to be doing that.' They're on your side.

On the flip side, I enjoy covering the Arab world, I've spent my entire career here in the Middle East, but I would never call myself a war correspondent.

I was a war correspondent in Korea. I did a book on it: 'This is War.'

I had no desire to go to Iraq. I never wanted to go to Mosul. I'm not a war correspondent. No part of me thrives on the adrenaline or anything like that.

Could I pass a week in the insane ward at Blackwell's Island? I said I could and I would. And I did.

It's not your job to be warm on the news; you can be empathetic, but you can't emote. That can be difficult sometimes - but it is my job not to cry.

Andy Stasiuk was a newsman of the old school of front-page journalism - tough, knowledgeable, cynical, single-minded and fun. He covered the news as a happy warrior in an era of cutthroat editorial competition.

When you have been born in a war like me, living in a war as a child, when you have been in wars as a war correspondent all your life - trust me! You develop a form of fatalism; you are always ready to die.

Over my career, I've reinvented myself numerous times. I covered the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA. I wrote about labor wars, trade wars and real wars. I chronicled a nuclear plant meltdown and the defeat of Communism. I co-founded a couple of media businesses.

No one else will really care, but I missed the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Also the war in Chechnya.