Katy Tur Quotes

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

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.

Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.

In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.

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.

I have learned as a journalist that if you look long enough and hard enough and carefully enough, most truths are discoverable.

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

Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.

Great questions make great reporting.

To newspapers and publishing houses I urge the use of fact over fiction, freedom of the press, and responsibility at all times.

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 think the most important thing journalism taught me is to mine for details. The details are key. You can't try to be funny or strange or poignant; you have to let the details be funny or strange or poignant for you.

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.

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.

If there's anything that's important to a reporter, it is integrity. It is credibility.

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.

Journalists are supposed to be skeptical, that's what keeps them digging rather than simply accepting the official line, whether it comes from government or corporate bureaucrats.

I think all good reporting is the same thing - the best attainable version of 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.

You can’t report on something that you don’t know about.

Our job is to get as close to the verified truth as is possible.

We are not a paid bunch of bullies. Our job is to get the facts.

I have long argued that no one should be allowed to write opinion without spending years as a reporter - nothing like interviewing all four eyewitnesses to an automobile accident and then trying to write an accurate account of what happened.

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

As a journalist - or as a writer - my obligation is to come as close to the truth as I possibly can. And that's not as close to someone else's truth, but the truth as I see it.