Quotes on Journalist

Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.

Strange bonds of trust and self-deception tend to grow between journalists and their subjects.

Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together," Pulitzer wrote. "An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.

I'm not searching for hard news; I'm not a journalist, but I'm interested in pushing to boundaries of where we can do the kind of stories that we want to do. I mean, it's a big world and CNN has made it a lot bigger and they haven't flinched.

No journalist has ever been in my house and no photographs have ever been taken of where I live. I don't parade my family out for display, which is the way it will stay.

It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes.

Bad things don't happen to writers; it's all material.

There is a terrific disadvantage in not having the abrasive quality of the press applied to you daily. Even though we never like it, and even though we wish they didn't write it, and even though we disapprove, there isn't any doubt that we could not do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

Too few journalists become screenwriters. I say to all the would-be screenwriters: Become journalists. And I’ll say to working journalists: Do not stay journalists. Become screenwriters.

I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.

A journalist is a reporter out of a job.

A person whose financial requirements are modest and whose curiosity, skepticism, and indifference to reputation are outsized is a person at risk of becoming a journalist.

I became a journalist because I didn't want to have to rely on the press for information... I only read it to make sure of whatever everyone else thinks is going on, because it's useful to know what people think is the news.

One of the most important roles of our journalists is to be watchdogs.

Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

We have to compete in a universe of 200 networks, so we have to carve out our own niche, and to me, that niche is just basic shoe-leather journalism with some good journalists at the helm you can trust as presenters.

I became a journalist to come as close as possible to the heart of the world.

When I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder the year I turned 50, it was certainly a shock. But as a journalist, knowing a little bit about a lot of things, I didn't suffer the misconception that depression was all in my head or a mark of poor character. I knew it was a disease, and, like all diseases, was treatable.

I believe democracy requires a 'sacred contract' between journalists and those who put their trust in us to tell them what we can about how the world really works.

I suppose, in the end, we journalists try - or should try - to be the first impartial witnesses of history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: 'we didn't know - no one told us.'