Quotes About Journalism

Every diminution of the liberty of the press is followed by a diminution of civilization. Wherever we see the freedom of the press interfered with, there we see the nutrition of the human family interrupted.

If you take the more general role of going to local stations around the country in Montana or South Carolina or wherever, and start in the local news, it's a lot more difficult to get to the stories that you want to really cover.

Being a journalist always makes you a quick study of wherever you're at. You're out all the time and seeing places that normally you wouldn't get to see. It gives you an unusual level of insight into any place.

With every story that TV covers, somebody - some corporation, some shareholders - are making money. That's true whether covering Libya, Iraq, the tsunami in Japan, Osama bin Laden, whatever story there is. That day, the shareholders are making money off it. Every newspaper that's sold, somebody's making a dime.

I went to school at the University of Rhode Island and pursued a degree in journalism, which is a little bit ironic.

There is a lurking sense that there is a kind of seedy corruption underlying a lot of public life today. But while journalism does a very good job of describing that corruption, it is failing to bring it into a bigger focus. To explain what it is all about.

I'm interested in non-fiction, but a form of it which is very badly behaved, which doesn't define itself as straight-ahead journalism or memoir. It blurs boundaries, plays fast and loose with the truth - not to be silly, whimsical or lazy, but to get greater purchase on what it feels like to be alive.

I'm whispering so that the media doesn't hear me.

The night before I began my career as a presidential campaign reporter, in September 2007, I finished Theodore White's 'The Making of the President,' the classic account of the 1960 race, which opened up a new era of campaign reporting.

Do you know what White House correspondents call actors who pose as reporters? Anchors.

As a reporter having covered him for eight years in the White House, I am sure the press could have done a better job if we had known the real Ronald Reagan.

I never thought I'd be covering the White House. I never thought I'd be covering the White House for CNN. And I never thought I'd be covering the White House for CNN while Donald Trump was president.

In the 1970s, 'The Boys on the Bus' exposed how a clubby pack of male political reporters ruled the road to the White House and shaped the news. Four decades later, an outsider gal from Alaska has commandeered the 2012 media bus - and left Beltway journalism insiders eating her dust.

The 800-pound gorillas of TV news are gone. When I was the White House correspondent at NBC, and Tom Brokaw was anchor, the reporters were protected.

If you write something the White House doesn't like, they take you in and say, 'If you ever write something like you did today, nobody from the White House will ever talk to you again,'

I've covered the White House and been yelled at by presidents.

I was given a White House - well, you will have to ask the White House that. But I asked to attend the White House briefing because I was, you know, because I wanted to report on the activities there.

It's not like I just have to go to Washington and go to the White House everyday, and go to the same press conference at 10 in the morning and then be briefed at 4 in the afternoon, and then get a story on at 6.

AP promoted me to the White House beat because I knew Clinton, his family, friends, and staff better than anybody in the national press corps. Those contacts helped me break a few stories and get my career in Washington jump-started.

Every year at this time I join a growing number of journalistic flagellants in enumerating things that I got wrong in the previous annum's worth of columns.

What everybody forgets is that when I was a journalist in Britain and in the United States, I was always a Canadian. And the price of expatriation does not go down, it goes up. I never felt part of the political common sense of Britain. I never felt it in the United States. I had no natural home in Britain and the U.S.

Fact-checking doesn't exist primarily because some of us are liars and cheats. It exists because writers will be writers, much as they may mean to be historians.

Generally the aesthetics of broadcast journalism seem to me to be incredibly primitive.

I got asked by a freelance journalist to jump in front of Princess Diana's funeral. How pathetic is that? That would have been the stupidest thing on the planet.