Quotes About Journalism

I think the Internet is a free press, you know?

Al Jazeera is known in the Arab world as the voice of freedom of expression.

I freelance as a sports broadcaster.

Where in the world would I rather be than on the front line of history?

I'm going to be the next David Frost.

There is something fantastically post-modern about David Frost.

I've been writing full-time since about 1984 - mostly magazine features and columns.

Magazines and newspapers used to think of themselves as something coherent--an issue, an edition, an institution. Not as the publisher of dozens of discrete pieces to be trafficked each day on Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

Journalism was vigilant about separating the church of editorial from the secular concerns of business. We can now see the justification for such fanaticism about building a thick, tall wall between the two. The fear was that we'd enter a world where readers couldn't tell the difference between editorial and advertising—where the corrupt hand of advertisers would interfere with the journalistic search for truth. Those fears are in the process of being realized.

One of sports journalism's great ironies is that covering an Olympics can be wildly unhealthy. NBC shows athletes in peak health performing on the ice and snow, but not the haggard reporters subsisting for three weeks on stadium starches, cheap beer, deadlines, and little sleep.

Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you're at it.

William Dalrymple called me a war junkie in his silly book. No, I don't have a desire for it. I'm appalled and infuriated by it.

In the nineteen-thirties, one in four Americans got their news from William Randolph Hearst, who lived in a castle and owned twenty-eight newspapers in nineteen cities.

Many of the writers who have inspired me most are outside the genre: Humorists like Robert Benchley and James Thurber, screenwriters like Ben Hecht and William Goldman, and journalists/columnists like H.L. Mencken, Mike Royko and Molly Ivins.

There have been many great newspapermen, but to my mind, only two have achieved immortality: Pulitzer for his endowment and William Randolph Hearst for his castle.

NBC anchor Brian Williams is a standup comic in disguise.

I want to see Brian Williams with no irony wearing a mustache.

For a man who purports to have learned of media ethics only this month, Mr. Williams has spent an undue amount of time appearing as a media ethicist on both CNN and the cable news networks of NBC.

I don't think there will ever be a permanent truce, but I believe the media needs to be more careful and be willing to count to 10 before rushing on the air or into print.

If information is true, if it can be verified, and if it's really important, the newspaper needs to be willing to take the risk associated with using unidentified sources.

I always knew my death would be a possible consequence of the work I do. But for me it was a price I was willing to pay because this is what I believed in.

Don't commit to being a columnist unless you're willing to do it right. Report your behind off, so you have something original and useful to say. Say it in a way that will interest someone other than you, your family and your sources.

What's an ambush interview? You walk up to a fellow who you want to talk to, and he hasn't been - he hadn't been willing to talk to you before. You've sent him letters, and you've tried to talk to him on the phone. So you walk up to him on the street and ask him a question - that's an ambush?

It shouldn't take extreme courage and a willingness to go to prison for decades or even life to blow the whistle on bad government acts done in secret. But it does. And that is an immense problem for democracy, one that all journalists should be united in fighting.