Richard V. Allen Quotes

I did not wish to bribe myself.

Many government officials have very high moral standards at the beginning of their duties, but after a while some officials sway from the right path and easily fall into the temptation of bribery and fraud.

Politicians are expected to spend half their time talking to funders and to keep them happy. Given this context, it's not hard to see how a bribery charge can feel like a technical argument instead of a moral one.

When you don't take a stand against corruption you tacitly support it.

The ethic of the journalist is to recognize one's prejudices, biases, and avoid getting them into print.

The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America (is that it) has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists.

The key was disclosure, and nobody has ever raised a concern that anybody who contributed, whether a campaign contributor or a gift giver, ever got anything for it.

Journalism and the questions of journalistic ethics, and why certain stories are put on the air, when, how and for what reasons, are big questions in our culture and society.

Never do nothing you wouldnt want printed on the front page of The New York Times.

Sometimes you have to do what’s wrong in order to do what’s right.

Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. Yet I do not suppose there is one paper in England that can be straightforwardly bribed with hard cash. In the France of the Third Republic all but a very few of the newspapers could notoriously be bought over the counter like so many pounds of cheese.

By this point, it was clear she wasn't interested in continuing the relationship. What publication on earth would continue a relationship with a writer who would refuse to discuss her work with her editors? What publication would continue to publish a writer who attacked it on TV? What publication would continue to publish a writer who lied about it - on TV and to a Washington Post reporter? ... It's true: Ann is fearless, in person and in her writing. But fearlessness isn't an excuse for crappy writing or crappier behavior.

You know that things are not going well when you lose the moral high ground to a TMZ reporter.

One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.

I mean, I think everybody in the world, all the young people in the world, went to journalism school and wanted to investigate everything. And I think they overdid it. I think that you have to investigate things, you have to e skeptical, but you shouldn't be vengeful. You have to be fair and you have to be careful.

I am constantly torn between the attitude of the conscientious journalist who is a recorder and interpreter of the facts and of the creative artist who often is necessarily at poetic odds with the literal facts.

In the military, if we don't know something, we say we don't know and proceed to shut up until we do. Some highly paid charlatans in the media think it's absolutely fine to take a wild guess at the truth and then tell a couple of million people it's cast-iron fact, just in case they might be right...I hope they're proud of themselves, because they nearly broke my mom's heart.

I think that - not just as a journalist but as a human being - I have the ethical responsibility to avoid actions that can harm innocent people.

Journalism should never be prostituted for selfish ends or for the sake of merely earning a livelihood or, worse still, for amassing money.

What I wound up doing, which I think is really journalistically dubious, is changing the order of some of the things I did, so that the things I ended up struggling with the most wind up being two-thirds of the way in.

Making stuff up is the worst thing a journalist can do. Plagiarizing is the second worst.

Apparently it was unethical for lawyers to sleep with their clients. This from a man who offered legal representation to assassins.

I can be bought. If they paid me enough, I'd work for the Klan.

There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.