Haskell Wexler Quotes

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.

I reject the idea that journalists are messengers of the truth. It’s arrogant. I think journalism is a search for the little relative truths that at best keep us relatively sane.

There has been far too much of journalists deciding they are on the side of something and going out to get the story, instead of truth seeking which is a different thing.

You can never get all the facts from just one newspaper, and unless you have all the facts, you cannot make proper judgements about what is going on.

Great questions make great reporting.

See, I have no journalism in my background, so I wasn't practised at research or writing non-fiction, nor at handling the truth in a journalistic way. Journalists know when to call a halt and write something, but I kept on looking for answers.

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

Confrontation is not a dirty word. Sometimes it's the best kind of journalism as long you don't confront people just for the sake of a confrontation.

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.

Scepticism is a necessary and vital part of the journalist's toolkit. But when scepticism becomes cynicism it can close off thought and block the search for truth.

Art is art, and journalism is journalism.

Reporters have to use their imagination, really put themselves in the shoes of the person they want to interview.

I'm not an advocacy journalist - that's not what I do. My role in journalism is to be able to engage the most interesting people with the best ideas.

Once we thought, journalists and readers alike, that if we put together enough 'facts' and gave them a fast stir, we would come up with something that, at least by the standards of short-order cooks, could be called the truth.

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

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

It's about being right and trying to get the facts and get the story right, and inform, you know, the readership or the viewership. And there are some reporters that do that.

I'm still hesitant to call myself a journalist. I see myself as a documentary maker who is trusted with hard-hitting current affairs issues.

I want to be a journalist; I want to ask tough questions.

I'm a reporter by nature and training. I like things that make sense.

In the most polarized and passionate, the most angry and aggressive news environment in recent memory, my job as a journalist requires me - often - to push back in live interviews against comments that are unfair, untrue, or leave me thinking, 'Is this seriously happening right now?'

I have found where I am best, and that is being a fact-checker and being fearless.

In most daily journalism, you only fact-check something if it seems a little fishy.

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

From journalism I learned to write under pressure, to work with deadlines, to have limited space and time, to conduct and interview, to find information, to research, and above all, to use language as efficiently as possible and to remember always that there is a reader out there.