Katie Hafner Quotes

A good journalist is not the one that writes what people say, but the one that writes what he is supposed to write.

Most reporters are so transactional rather than strategic.

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

If you're a journalist - and I think, on some level, I'm a journalist, and proud to be a journalist, or a documentarian, however you want to describe it - part of what I do has to be the pursuit of the truth.

Whenever you're reporting, there's always something you can't say or write, but the questions, you always want to get as close to that line as possible. You want to ask the tough questions.

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

I can swear on a stack of Bibles that not once in doing the 'CBS Evening News' for 19 years - well, I take it back. Once perhaps. But during 19 years, with perhaps one exception, was I ever aware of any political or commercial pressure on that broadcast whatsoever.

For somebody who is a journalist, I can be awfully unobservant sometimes.

Journalists prize independence - not teamwork.

A good journalist is modest; his only job is simple: to decide what counts as news.

We don't go into journalism to be popular. It is our job to seek the truth and put constant pressure on our leaders until we get answers.

I will never repeat something verbatim on the air unless I know it's accurate. And when you go to the source, sometimes there's a better story beyond the original story. That happens all the time.

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

The courage in journalism is sticking up for the unpopular, not the popular.

I'm a working journalist. I'm interested in all points of view, and I draw conclusions based on facts, not just on opinions.

As a journalist, you have to have multiple sources and verifiable science, and when you've done that and satisfied the most skeptical voice in your head, you have an obligation to ride through the streets - let people know what's going on.

I'm in the business, as a journalist, of asking tough questions.

I have always thought it morally unacceptable to kill stories, not to run stories, that people have risked their lives to get.

As a journalist, one tends to think there's nothing off limits.

I think as an investigative reporter I had tough standards, but I don't think of myself as a tough person.

We journalists are never so idiotic as when we analyze things that we shouldn't be analyzing.

There are certain stories that remind you of the moral purpose that originally drew you to become a reporter.

What you realize hanging out with investigative reporters is that, while they may be personally liberal, they don't let that get in the way of a good story.

Journalism is the protection between people and any sort of totalitarian rule. That's why my hero, admittedly a flawed one, is a journalist.

Journalists aren't supposed to be cheerleaders.