Quotes About Journalism

Don't call me a journalist; I hate the word. It's pretentious!

The really tough thing would have been to decide to take Woodward and Bernstein off the story. They were carrying the coal for us - in that their stories were right.

The American media is delivering nothing but fakeness.

Free media is very essential for the democratic process and... development.

What we have to do is put this in a coherent form for them at the end of the day, and on the big events, give them the kind of context that they deserve.

I'm not going to be one of those interviewers that forensically destroys someone.

Courtney Love is so famous among journalists for her loquaciousness that the joke is that you don't have to worry about questions when you interview her - just be sure you have lots of tape.

I never do formal interviews. I don't use a tape recorder. I take notes but occasionally.

I could learn how to press 'Record' on a tape recorder and write for a newspaper or a magazine.

I bought a tape recorder and some stuff and went to Europe for three months when I was 18. The puppeteering was only there as a hobby. I wanted to be a journalist. When I was 19, and after I had spent about a year in college, Jim Henson asked me to come out and try puppeteering for awhile.

I know Fox News is the target of criticism but we take it in stride. Our No. 1 goal is to be accurate.

Henry Blodget does occasionally have a new idea. If you're making a point about aggregation or the emptiness of modern journalism, he's far from the best target. Try Huffpo - or Gawker writers whose souls have been corroded by irony.

The competitive advantage professional journalism enjoys over the free is just that: professional journalists, whose paid positions give them the time and resources they need to commit more fully to the task. If we can't do better, so be it.

Part of my job at 'The Economist' was writing about HIV, and that included the grim task of reporting on the state of the global epidemic.

But with nonfiction, the task is very straightforward: Do the research, tell the story.

I have to force myself to remember that if I can't do my job, people's stories won't get told, and that helps me to focus on the task at hand.

Stories, as we're taught in journalism school early on, are told through people. Those stories make our documentaries powerful. You can explore someone's culture, you can explore their experience, you can explore an issue through human beings who are going through it.

We are inflicting opinion in our newscasts like never before. That was never done and never taught in our journalism classes.

I think Syria is often covered by phone. You have to talk to activists. You have to try to read the tea leaves. You have to talk to government officials. It's remote-control reporting in a way.

I was really just the tea boy to begin with, or the equivalent thereof, but I quickly announced, innocently but very ambitiously, that I wanted to be, I was going to be, a foreign correspondent.

There's a lot of stuff they don't teach you in the mythical editors' school. They don't teach you that you're going to have to spend a lot of your life in crisis management.

I've had a lot of fun, and when I talk to kids in journalism schools, I say, look, I know what the journalism teachers tell you that this is a great way to perform public service and all that, but I say the main reason, if you decide what you want to do is be a reporter, the main reason you want to do it is because it's just so much fun.

An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did, and it was published the very next week.

I had the most incredible English and literature teachers in school, and it really influenced my love of storytelling. It's what made me excited to study journalism in college. I love editorials and documentaries. All of that came from being given the opportunity to lose myself in good writing when I was a kid.