Samuel Johnson Quotes

It's the broadcaster's dilemma. Are we true journalists? I don't know if I am or not.

We in the media should be breaking the news and not making the news.

Journalism: A profession whose business is to explain to others what it personally does not understand.

There's an old saw about journalism that the more you know about a subject, the less sense reporting about it makes.

It's all storytelling, you know. That's what journalism is all about.

But the reporter has the responsibility to determine, number one, whether that is true, and number two, to make a judgment as to whether it's in the public interest and whether or not it should be part of the debate.

The first duty of a newspaper is to be accurate. If it be accurate, it follows that it is fair.

I mean, journalism is very detailed... you try to get down in the weeds and sort out exactly what happened. And I don't think that a feature film is really a place where that happens.

In this day and age, much of journalism is about right or left, conservative or liberal, and 'The Observer' is just that: an observer. It is about truth.

It's a journalist's job to be a witness to history. We're not there to worry about ourselves. We're there to try and get as near as we can, in an imperfect world, to the truth and get the truth out.

There is a huge difference between journalism and advertising. Journalism aspires to truth. Advertising is regulated for truth. I'll put the accuracy of the average ad in this country up against the average news story any time.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.

The essence of American journalism is vulgarity divested of truth.

The news and truth are not the same thing.

A journalists's job is not to be balanced. It is to be accurate.

I accept the media for what they are. Most of them are really good people. Some of them are scumbags.

As anchorman of the CBS Evening News, I signed off my nightly broadcasts for nearly two decades with a simple statement: 'And that's the way it is.' To me, that encapsulates the newsman's highest ideal: to report the facts as he sees them, without regard for the consequences or controversy that may ensue.

I don't think much of the journalism that I see.

We need ethical journalism. There is also capacity limitations in journalism.

Now everybody is questioning everything, so it's up to journalists who really care about the truth to fight for their corner of the truth and journalistic freedom.

Just because you read a report in the 'New York Times,' the 'Economist,' or, yes, 'The New Yorker' doesn't make it true. But we do know that a few people have evaluated that story with what strikes me as fairly objective standards of reason.

I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are.

Look, everybody in journalism has a reputation of sorts.

But there's a big difference between, say, reporting on a story and simply making up a story.