TED KOPPEL

Emotions get in the way but they don't pay me to start crying at the loss of 269 lives. They pay me to put some perspective on the situation.

History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions.

People shouldn't expect the mass media to do investigative stories. That job belongs to the 'fringe' media.

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.

The responsibility that I feel is to do as good a job as a journalist as I can possibly do.

In the days of Caesar, kings had fools and jesters. Now network presidents have anchormen.

I have been an unabashed fan of NPR for many years, and have stolen untold excellent ideas from its programming.

Our society finds truth too strong a medicine to digest undiluted. In its purest form, truth is not a polite tap on the shoulder. It is a howling reproach.

I have the necessary lack of tact.

More than four thousand programs produced and consumed. Some of them were pretty good, a great many of them were forgettable; but a handful may even be worth a book.

There is something very very special, universal and easily identifiable among all Jews; it is beyond territory, it is something we all have in common.

My level of cynicism about the reasons that took us to war against Iraq remain just as well-developed as they were before I went.

There is no more respected or influential forum in the field of journalism than the New York Times. I look forward, with great anticipation, to contributing to its op-ed page.

I think we're glazing eyes all across America.

When I hear about a man talking about having been taken out to the Van Allen space radiation belt of space ships that were essentially the same thing as the DC-8, I've got to tell you, I mean, if we're talking about this man's credibility, that certainly raises some questions in my mind about his credibility.

The people who run campaigns today have more iron control over the campaign than they did 20 or 30 years ago.

Every organization has men and women who will be sure that the news gets out when it is good news. The problem is with the bad news. That is the challenge of democracy

If somebody is going to hand me a load of BS, I feel obliged to call attention to the steaming pile

Flying is safer than it has been in a long time. It just doesn't seem that way.

If you'd like to buy some of the fruits of deregulation, we have some S&L's [savings & loan's] we'd like to sell you.

If you're in public life, a certain percentage of what you do must be done on television.

One has to be careful when listening to diplomats to hear exactly what is being said.

We elect our presidents to protect U. S. national interests.

When there is a conflict between a [network] corporation and the needs of it’s news division, the corporate interest will win out.

Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.