Quotes About Journalism

I remember one time I wrote something very, very critical about Wilt Chamberlain. The next time I saw him - and Wilt was not a man, as huge as he was - he was not a man of confrontation. And we were in the Lakers locker room. And he sent Jerry West over, and he said, 'Frank, Wilt would like you to leave.'

I mean the idea of this is that it's a good thing for the public to hear interviews like this and that there will be an inevitable amount of fewer interviews if people that the press talks to wind up thinking, well, it's not really a CBS correspondent.

It is fitting that yesteryear's swashbuckling newspaper reporter has turned into today's solemn young sobersides nursing a glass of watered white wine after a day of toiling over computer databases in a smoke-free, noise-free newsroom.

Where my dad taught me everything about writing, Graham Paterson, who gave me my first job at The Times, taught me everything about journalism, which is that it's no big deal, and it's more important to have a glass of wine.

Right Wing watch falsely accused me of harassing Oliver Darcy, a reporter for CNN. However, I was practicing real journalism at a Conservative conference where it is the consensus that 'CNN' is fake news.

When I hear people say that Fox News is right wing, I know that's not true, because I'm the one doing the news. It's my show, and there's no place for opinion on my show. It's uninteresting to me.

If you acquiesce to one interview, there's always another waiting in the wings. Also if you're interviewed repeatedly, you just start repeating yourself. I don't like to do that.

There's that old journalism rule that sunshine is the great disinfectant - which is how reporters bust their way into meetings and such all the time. In sports, I really think winning is the great disinfectant.

And after about two years, I realized that creative writing was not going to help you ace those biological tests. So I switched over to journalism. I didn't graduate with honors, but I did graduate on time and with some doing.

When I was in 10th grade, I took one of those tests that's supposed to tell you what you should be when you grow up. The test told me that I should be a journalist.

Tests conducted before I graduated predicted a future for me in journalism, forestry, or the teaching of music; persons who know me well could recognize some truth in those seemingly errant prognoses.

I intensely covered Bush when he was Governor of Texas.

I think that the very fact that CBS fought and fought and fought in Texas, in New York.

Any good broadcast, not just an Olympic broadcast, should have texture to it. It should have information, should have some history, should have something that's offbeat, quirky, humorous, and where called for it, should have journalism, and judiciously it should also have commentary. That's my ideal.

I thank God I was a reporter before I became a writer.

My function is, as objectively and accurately as I can, to present reality to people out there, and doing that as quickly as we do is quite difficult enough, thank you.

I don't expect the press to say thank you for the efforts that I make.

As an old reporter, we have a few secrets, and the first thing is we try the phone book.

The media has changed. We now give broadcast licenses to philosophies instead of people. People get confused and think there is no difference between news and entertainment. People who project themselves as journalists on television don't know the first thing about journalism. They are just there stirring up a hockey game.

The hardest thing in the world is to write something critical about someone and then show up the next day in the locker room. I mean, that is not fun, and that takes an awful lot of guts. And I never enjoyed that.

I've always been a big consumer of American journalism over the years and had an interest in the history of it and of the press in America; how it has changed.

I believe the most important thing for the media is to be objective, fair, and balanced. We should not report a story with preconceptions or prejudice.

The most important event I covered was the Panama Canal debate, which dragged on for months.

The most important ethical issues and the most difficult ones are the human ones because a reporter has enormous power to hurt people.