Quotes About Journalism

My first assignment was 12 weeks in Afghanistan. After that, I covered the Indian election for two months. Then I got a phone call saying, 'Hey, we want you in Brazil,' and the same happened for Somalia.

My training really was at the 'New York Times,' you know. When I got there, I was literally supposed to stay there for five weeks, and I got lucky like nobody, you know, like nobody's business.

The post-war American newsroom resembled a vast factory churning out multiple editions through the night. Reporters spent days, sometimes weeks, on a single story.

I befriended a homeless man five years ago, bought him a new set of teeth, helped him get his life on track. A writer for 'Elle' spent two hours talking to this guy and discarded almost everything he said. When the story came out, we both were weeping while reading it on the street!

With each assignment, I weigh the looming possibility of being killed, and I chastise myself for allowing fear to hinder me. War photographers aren't supposed to get scared.

I don't think I could've carried the weight that Murrow carried.

What I notice now is that a lot of the things that are said to us on camera, on air, are not particularly believed and quite often not true. It is an extraordinary position to be in. It is a really weird position to be in as a journalist.

I violated, apparently, an unspoken rule that we are supposed to take care of our own. Frankly, if that invites discomfort, I welcome it. I don't think there's enough discomfort in journalism, especially in Washington.

It is well known that Turkey has more imprisoned journalists than any other country, but as a result of the chilling effect of these prosecutions on the press, many stories never make the news.

I had a brief stint as 'People's Journalist' for the West Sussex Gazette; I'd do golden-wedding anniversaries and pet deaths. I was always looking for an angle; it wasn't great.

The funny thing about war is that people feel you need to be morally outraged. I feel morally outraged about it, and I've been doing it for long enough to feel morally outraged, because I have been in massacre scenes in West Africa, and I've been doing this for a long time now.

One of the reasons my husband and I connect is our shared value of service. It's why he went off to West Point at age 17 and never looked back. It's why I got into journalism in college.

Many journalists are influenced by a myopic multiculturalism that is suspicious of anything Western, while giving the benefit of the doubt to non-Western societies.

In so many countries, Western journalists are viewed simply as dollar signs. We're ransom objects.

As a Western woman in the Middle East, I am often put in a different category. I am sort of like the third sex. I am not treated like a man. I am not treated like a woman. I am just treated like a journalist. That is usually really helpful.

Most correspondents came from the former colonial powers - there were British, French, and a lot of Italians, because there were a lot of Italian communities there. And of course there were a lot of Russians.

I never really wanted to be a journalist, honestly. I always wanted to be a writer, and I thought the only way to apply that interest was with journalism - when you're young and you want to be a writer, it seems like the most practical thing to do with those types of ambitions.

The Daily Mail can't say 'asylum-seeker' without saying 'foreign criminal' in the same sentence. I'm sure it's practically editorial policy.

And I came away from that experience, and it was a very difficult experience - I came to understand that you have to practice at being a good father and practice at being a good husband, just as you have to practice at being a good journalist.

I didn't start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practise poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me.

I could not have written a novel if I hadn't been a journalist first, because it taught me that there's no muse that's going to come down and bestow upon you the mood to write. You just have to do it. I'm definitely not precious.

This much we know: Journalism is not a precise science. It's, on its best day, is a crude art. We make mistakes; I make mistakes. With more than 50 years as a journalist, I have at least had the opportunity to blow more stories, make more mistakes than maybe anybody in television.

I think, as journalists, we sometimes are afraid to enter into the emotional lives and the complications of the lives of the people we write about - we don't really have the space and the room to deal with those things. But as a novelist, that's precisely what you're writing about.

I've always performed. From the time that I was little, I was pretty precocious and always gravitated toward performing arts. But I was scared at first, deciding to do it for a living. So, initially, I majored in journalism, and I was pretty miserable.