Howell Raines Quotes

I am not responsible for all the journalists in the past that have told lies.

What appears in newspapers is often new but seldom true.

It's not cool to have your name in print when it's not the truth.

People think that if they read something in the newspaper or see it on TV, it has to be true.

… he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him.

We're not into all those dodgy journos who makes stories up.

There was an honorable tradition of using anonymous sources that was ruined by Jayson Blair.

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.

Scientifically speaking, if I say something, or it gets misquoted, or people put a spin on it... I mean, are you interested, really, in what people are saying?

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

A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently.

Fact-checking doesn't exist primarily because some of us are liars and cheats. It exists because writers will be writers, much as they may mean to be historians.

You can never trust what you read.

If it comes to be believed that we are simply a propaganda organ of some kind, as a lot of people believe about some of our competitors, that would be a problem.

You can't believe everything you read. I am only six foot three, by the way.

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

I send you the newspapers; but they do not always speak true.

Stop lying about my record.

From forty years' experience of the wretched guess-work of the newspapers of what is not done in the open daylight, and of their falsehood even as to that, I rarely think them worth reading, and almost never worth notice.

A news-writer is a man without virtue who lies at home for his own profit.

Certainly today we are incredibly tolerant of untruth.

The news and truth are not the same thing.

Before speaking without knowledge, saying lies, you have to present evidence.

Clearly, you can't believe everything you read in the press.

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