If youre a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the challenges of journalistic integrity and the urge for captivating stories.
David Halberstam highlights a fundamental truth in journalism: while obtaining a story may be relatively easy for a reporter, ensuring its accuracy is far more complex and crucial. He contrasts the past focus on factual mistakes, which were considered serious errors, with the contemporary issue of media becoming dull, implying that engaging storytelling should not come at the expense of truthfulness.
In practice
This quote can be referenced in a journalism workshop to emphasize ethical reporting.
Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefield and could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse it was contagious, and could destroy a unit before a battle even began. Because of that, commanders were first and foremost in the fear suppression business.
Being a professional means doing your job on the days you don't want to do it
Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.
With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.
If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past.
Bart Giamatti did not grow up (as he had dreamed) to play second base for the Red Sox. He became a professor at Yale, and then, in time president of the National Baseball League. He never lost his love for the Boston Red Sox. It was as a Red Sox fan, he later realized that human beings are fallen, and that life is filled with disappointment. The path to comprehending Calvinism in modern America, he decided, begins at Fenway Park.
I have been asking if I'm an activist or a journalist. And my answer is very simple. I'm just a journalist who asks questions.
Journalism, some huge percentage of it, should be devoted to putting pressure on power, on nonsense, on chicanery of all kinds and if that's going to invite a lawsuit, well, bring it on.
As I occasionally survey the pack of sycophantic shih tzus in the Washington press corps, wriggling on their bellies to kiss the feet of those in power, I feel plumb discouraged about the future of journalism.
I joined the 'Times' in 1972, and I came with the mark of Cain on me because I was clearly against the war. But my editor, Abe Rosenthal, he hired me because he liked stories. He used to come to the Washington bureau and almost literally pat me on the head and say, 'How is my little Commie today? What do you have for me?'
As a journalist, I know what it is like to incur the self-righteous wrath of people who denounce you for things you didn't say or didn't mean.
I kept thinking, I'm not going to do political journalism, because there's no way to keep my principles and be a political journalist, so I'll edit a popular science magazine. This will be my salvation, and I'll emerge with my integrity intact. That didn't even happen.
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