Quotes About Journalism

Soon after I graduated from Columbia University grad school, the war in Iraq started. I was a young freelance journalist with no experience in conflict zones but I wanted to be close to it, so I moved to Syria.

The media these days are not so much interested in saying things truthfully without distortion, without misrepresentation, without ridicule.

I'm not a go-in-for-the-kill kind of interviewer. It's a great thing to me, that kind of interviewer, but I'm not it. It doesn't play to my strengths at all. I like to interview people who are interested in telling their story and tell it as truthfully as they can.

Hyperbolic headlines always attract more attention than mundane truths.

If I have been fortunate enough to have risen to a level in this business where people would actually listen to me, then I think I have a duty to convey all truths that I encounter.

There is an emerging subgenre of British nonfiction in which journalists from 'The Guardian' fearlessly recount their own derring-do in David-and-Goliath battles waged against omnipotent state interests in the pursuit of Big Important Truths.

The ability of the press to print their stories without the government trying to get them to betray their sources is as essential to a free press as the ink it is printed with. Otherwise, who will hold accountable those who hold power over us?

I am someone who tunes into more ethical journalism, and I'm not someone who dwells a lot on the negative, so I think I'd rather focus on the positive and forge ahead.

What I learned is that there are indeed some stories that are too true to tell, too revealing for the general population to metabolize. And too challenging to your reporter colleagues, whose turf or toes you might have tread upon.

I write in all sorts of places; it's a legacy of my time as a journalist, where I could turn out copy in a hotel corridor. But I have a little office that I rent in my local town, and that's my ideal place.

When I entered politics, I took the only downward turn you could take from journalism.

Being a journalist, you write what you see. If we can't do that, what use are we? I turned years of training on myself.

Covering Richard Nixon's triumphant run in 1968 turned out to be my last major assignment as a general correspondent for CBS News. In September of that year, '60 Minutes' made its debut and I began the best, the most fulfilling job a reporter could imagine.

I must be the last person online to have been struck with this realization, but it's amazing how the Internet has empowered hundreds of ordinary people, turning them into little Diane Sawyers and Anderson Coopers as they snap and blog away.

If you've done a bit of journalism, everyone assumes you must be moving into PR. We're absolutely not becoming a PR agency and we're not turning into Brunswick. We will remain SRU, but we will be owned by the Brunswick Group. It's quite different.

I don't see myself as a Larry King or somebody. When you do interviews, sometimes it turns to interrogations. I'm more of a conversationalist, not throwing hardball questions.

I've always worked in cinemas or cafes to make money because it turns out freelance journalism is quite hard to get into.

I have an Emmy, but it's no big deal: work in TV news long enough, you eventually get one.

Journalism as theater is what TV news is.

Let me clarify a few things about TV news on the national level at NBC and MSNBC. We write our own stories. There is no teleprompter for reporters. No traveling makeup artists or stylists. And there is very little sleep.

There's always something at least a little smug about self-reference - magazine articles about idealistic journalists, TV shows about TV actors, ironic films within ironic-er films: all this meta-media populated by thinly disguised characters making oblique inside jokes.

Someone asked why I invited Jon Stewart to be the first guest on the 'Journal''s premiere in 2007. 'Because Mark Twain isn't available,' I answered. I was serious.

When I put out a tweet, and I put Reince's name in the tweet, they're all making the assumption that it's him because journalists know who the leakers are. So, if Reince wants to explain that he's not a leaker, let him do that.

The reason that I'm so fast at what I do is - I'm not saying that I'm getting stories that nobody else has - the difference is that if a tip goes out to five people, and I know that it's a reliable source, I just tweet it out. If you're at a respectable news organization, that would be considered irresponsible.